How to Search With Quotations Using Google

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary for Expert Village. Let's take a look at one of the most important features that needs to be used when doing a search, and that's quotation marks. Quotations are very important because it puts the exact phrase; it tells Google the exact phrase you want to search for. And using quotation marks, we can either limit or extend the type of search we want to do. For example, on the search, if we just put in the words - John Adams - and then we search. John Adams being one of the presidents we want to search for, we see that we have fifty nine million two hundred thousand results for John Adams, because, what is happening is without the quotation marks Google is searching for any page that has the word John and the word Adams in it, not necessarily together. But if we go ahead and put quotation marks on both sides, therefore Google is only going to look for that particular phrase. Now we do a search, we are going to see that now we've limited our search from fifty nine million to two million. Which is still a huge amount of pages to go through, but obviously we see that the quotations gave us a much more specific search. Now once we see how quotations work, how it limits our search terms, we need to understand how to use combinations of quotations and non quotation terms. For instance, let's say we want to do a search for the words, let's say, smart little man. I put the words little man in quotation marks so it's going to look for that phrase and the word smart is going to be an addition. In other words, it's not going to look for the words smart little man, it's going to look for the phrase "little man" and somewhere on the page should have the word smart. So, that's one way doing the search. Another reason why we want to use quotations marks is because there are small words that are called stop words that Google does not search for. Those word are like a, the, at, by, from and these words, when they are in our search terms, Google will not look for them and it will only look for the regular object words, the nouns and the verbs or adjectives. So, what we want to do, is we the search engine to search for those smaller words, we have to put it into the quotation marks. For example, if we are going to do a search for The Beatles, Google will not search the word The, it will only use the search for the word Beatles. Therefore we won't get as many results as if put them into quotations marks, now it will search for the entire term " The Beatles" and we will get more relevant search for what we are looking for."