Whether you use Google, Yahoo, MSN or Dogpile, searching the web can be both rewarding and frustrating. If you don’t have a few tips under your belt, you can waste needless time sorting and sifting through results which are all over the board. Everyone knows that you type words into your search engine and it returns pages upon pages of information about websites containing answers you might be seeking. Unfortunately, if you just type a few words into the search bar, you’re going to receive a jumble of both relevant and irrelevant results.
So how do you pare down your Googles? Let’s take a look at two of the biggest search engines: Google. Now, I’m a Google nut, but I have also used Yahoo from time to time.
Let’s start with the basics on Google. You type in a couple words and viola, pages return with information. You start sifting through.
Tip #1: Get exact results by adding “quotation marks” around your search term
Most people know that if you type in more than one word, for instance, a name, search engines will return every result that contains those two words. I searched first on my name, Judith Brandy. Google brought back every website that had the words, Judith and Brandy in its title or description. It included a liquor site, people who were names Brandy with a different first name and assorted other junk that was irrelavant to my search. I was Googling myself to see where my articles had been placed. So, Brandy DVDs and Videos at Search Extreme, would not help me. Surprisingly, I popped up at the top as an ExpertAuthor on an article site and found out that a couple of my articles had been picked up on some other websites already. This was nice know, but as I scrolled down, I found relevance disappearing before I reached the bottom of page one. So I added the quotations, and viola, a much more narrow, relevant search result was returned. So the addition of quotations was a real plus.
Tip #2: Narrow the results you receive by adding a space followed by a minus signed followed by the words you want to exclude
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