Tips 2

Using an internet search engine

Search engines when used in a basic way return too many hits, and it can be very time consuming looking through all those web sites. So how can we get more accurate search results?

We need to include operators in our search strings - operators being "", +, -, ~, ..

Search engines like Google ignore common words like "how", "are", as well as most single digits and single letters. If you put a "+" sign in front of a common word it will be included in the search. You can also do a phrase search by putting the phrase in quotations.

Lets say I was doing a search for the movie Back to the Future 1 this is what I would type.

back to the future +1 or "back to the future 1" this would narrow my search and not show results with the movies part 2 or part 3.

Using "-" sign in front of a word will exclude that word. A good time to use this is when searching for things like Bass. Now its fishing and not music I'm after so this is what I would type.

bass -music This would exclude anything to do with music.

You may want to search for a particular keyword, but also for synonyms. We use the "~" tilde symbol in front of the word. Example of this would be if I wanted to search for food facts and nutrition and cooking information I would type.

~food ~facts

You can also use the logical "OR" operator to find sites that include either word A OR B. This is an example.

vacation london OR paris

Next we look at searching whithin a particular site. You can do this in Google by entering the word "site:" and a colon followed by the web site. Say I wanted to search for "button" on www.picketpost.com I would type in.

button site:www.picketpost.com

The last one is an important one when searching dates. By using 2 periods ".." between numbers this is looked at like a range. Here is an example.

1700..1800 canada maps another example is money metal detector $200..500 for sale

Hopefully this will help you find what your looking for faster allowing you to spend more time digging.