Advanced Web Search Techniques

Advanced search techniques can save you time.

Searching for specific information on the Web can be difficult. It is possible to waste hours trying to whittle down search results to find the information you need after doing a few keyword searches. However, advanced Web search techniques, compatible with most search engines, can save hours on research and help you find exactly what you want.

Phrasing

It’s important to enter the exact word or words you want to find information on. When searching for a group of words or a phrase, enclose the phrase in quotes to get results that are specific to the topic you are researching. For instance, searching for “NFL playoff schedule” will return more specific results than if you type in the same phrase without quotes, which will return anything that contains any of the three words.

Asterisk Advantages

Using an asterisk can also be helpful as an advanced search technique. Adding an asterisk to the end of a word without a space will return results with all variations of the word. For instance, searching for quilt* will return results that include quilt, quilter, quilts, quilting and so on. Using the asterisk to perform fill-in-the-blank searches is also a useful search technique. For example, if you want to know how many World Series games the New York Yankees have won, you will find results faster by entering: Yankees won world series * times.

Plus and Minus Signs

A minus sign (-) can be useful for eliminating certain information from search results. If you have ever searched for information about cardinals, you will get many results for the baseball and football team. Try searching: cardinals -football -baseball for more specific results. A plus sign (+) before a word without a space will indicate the search is for that exact word rather than variations.

Capitalize Conjunctions

Conjunctions such as "or" and "and" are useless in searches unless you capitalize them. For instance, if you want to return results that specifically contain information on both cats and dogs, you would enter: cats AND dogs. The same rule applies to other conjunctions such as OR as well as conjunctive phrases such as AND NOT. You can also add parenthesis for an even more advanced search method. For example, if you want to find information on dogs and fleas or dogs and ticks, you would enter: dogs AND (fleas OR ticks).

References

• Google: More Search Help