Search Operators Are Standing By

Posted by Ken

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There’s so much the Web has to offer that it can be a daunting task to find what you’re looking for. When doing an online search, the important thing to remember is that search engines have ways to help you narrow the results it provides you. Here are some tips that will help you search more efficiently.

When you search on a keyword or keyword phrase, you’re tell the search engine to find any and all pages that have that keyword. Based on its algorithms (the math that determines the popularity of a Web page), it will display what it thinks is the most relevant information and rank it accordingly. The more relevant the information, the higher up the list it goes.

To help you sift through all those results to get to the meat of what you’re looking for, search engines make use of operators — the ‘+’ or ‘-’ and other signs that help you tell the engine what to include or exclude.

For example, searching on Hawaiian cruise will deliver you results with Web pages containing both those words anywhere in the page. But you may also get pages with Tom Cruise which can unncessarily add noise to your list. To help filter out that information, type in the search box “-tom” in addition to the terms you originally searched on. By doing this you’re telling the engine, “in these results, show me the ones without the word ‘tom‘ in them.” You’d still get a lot of results, but this one simple modification to your search string has just made your list of results more relevant and bumped those sites you want to know about further up the list.

Putting quotes around a phrase like “four score and seven years ago” will find pages with those words together on a Web page. Those individuals words could be all over a page, but if they’re not together, then that page won’t make it to your list.

Perhaps you don’t mind finding things that are related. In this case you’d want to use “or” within your search string, like hunting OR fishing.

Here’s Google’s cheat sheet that offers more tips. Not only will you find it useful, but I’ll bet you’ll also find that other search engines use the same type of operators. Either way, be sure to check out the advanced search options or help section on whatever search engine you use. Doing so could help you save a lot of time finding what you want.

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