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Narrow your focus
Get better results from your Web searches.
Searching for something on the World Wide Web can be a frustrating exercise. However, knowing how search engines work and how to use their full capabilities can help increase your odds of finding what you want among hundreds of millions of Web pages.
How they work
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and
AltaVista constantly scan the Internet with “spiders,” keeping an index of the words they find and where they find them. Spiders are automated pieces of software that crawl across the Web—get it?—starting with the most-viewed pages and following every link on every page. In addition to the terms indexed by spiders, meta tags also contribute to the search process. Meta tags enable the owners of Web pages to specify key words and concepts under which their pages will be indexed.
All this indexed data must be displayed in
a user-friendly format; a random list of every
page on the Web where the words real estate occur wouldn’t be very helpful. So, each search engine uses its own formula to weigh the relevance of each word, typically assigning greater weight to terms that occur in meta
tags, headlines, and subheads. The ranking system also takes into account how often a term appears on a page, whether the term is capitalized, bold, etc.
Pick a category
Not only should your search terms include the specific word you’re looking for, it should also include the theme or category of your search to pick up on meta tags and other highly weighted search factors. Don’t just type John Lennon into Google; include The Beatles and music. The more information you give search engines to work with, the better they will perform.
Make it complicated
Use quotation marks to ensure you get exactly the phrase you’re looking for. The words between the quotation marks are treated as a whole that must be found as entered in the Web page. Example: Entering real estate agent in a search engine could get you results for pages that advertise a “really good cleaning agent used on the Trump estate.” However, typing “real estate agent” ensures that all results will include those words as one phrase.
Look for an “advanced search” link on your search engine’s home page to further specify your query. In most cases, the advanced-search page will present you with a series of fill-in-the-blank options that translate into Boolean operators such as AND and OR.
You can also insert these operators in the search field without jumping to an “advanced” page. Be aware that most search engines today assume an “AND” between your search terms, meaning that every word must appear in the pages of results. It won’t hurt to add AND or “+” between search terms to ensure the results you want, but it may not be necessary.
If you want either one search term or the other to appear on a page, insert or in your search. Example: If you’re looking for a colleague’s Web page but can’t remember how he spells his last name, type McDonald OR MacDonald.
The more complex you make your query, the more likely it is you’ll find what you want. If you want to find a home inspector in Sugar Land, “sugar land” “home inspector” will get you far fewer results than sugar land home inspector. Combine operators, use quotation marks—do anything you can to help the search engine eliminate bad results.
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