You probably think you already know how to use a search engine. It’s simple, right? Just type or say what you want to search for and voila… right? Well, that works, but there are more efficient ways to utilize search engines today.
If you’re into learning the cool little tricks that most people don’t know, this is the article for you. Check out a quick look into some tips and tricks for using search engines more effectively.
Table of Contents
Use quotations for exact searches
If you’re searching for something super specific, you can refine your search using the power of quotations. Say you remember a specific phrase on a page you came across earlier, but you can’t remember the name of the site.
You can input the words you remember and surround them with quotations to limit the results you get to dig through. If you’re looking for something that’s not very common like industrial centrifugal pump packages, the quotations will direct your search path more precisely.
Use a minus operator to narrow searches
If you want to minimize the extras that might pop up with various broad terms, you can use a minus operator to narrow the results listing. For instance, the word mustang could bring up results about a nice car or a gorgeous horse.
If you’re looking for the mustang horse, then you could type in mustang -car. The mustang car will not be considered for listing in the results, and you’ll get more sites dealing with horses instead.
Things that don’t really matter
You can make searching for specific results a little easier by excluding the words that don’t really matter. Search engines don’t recognize filler words like a and the, and they don’t recognize capitalization either.
Punctuation is also a factor that is typically ignored by search engine algorithms. Try using just the main words within your search query, and you should find more relevant results when you press enter.
Use the various tabs
You have tabs on your browser, of course, but these tabs are different. When you do a Google search, there are various results tabs that are generated automatically. You’ll see specifications like web, image, news, etc.
Use those tabs to further define your search whenever it seems advantageous. Sometimes you just want to see what something looks like, and that is the perfect time to search using the image tab.
Searching for something from a specific site
Finally, there’s a way for you to use Google to search for specific information within a certain website. If you’re looking for information on a specific site, you would type in your keywords, and then follow your keywords with site:nameofsite.com.