Have you ever used one of the major search engines? You enter your search word or phrase only to find that you get 50,000 returns for the word you chose. Trying, isn't it? How are you supposed to find anything in that lot!
Using a search engine need not be such a waste of time providing you know a few simple tricks in order to get what you want. This article explains how to use a search engine so that you can find what you are looking for without being swamped by thousands of returns.
First of all, let's see how a search engine actually works. When a webmaster submits their site to a search engine they will build into their pages special words (known as META tags). Keywords are stored by the search engine along with the address of the page. For example, on our site
www.stonebtb.com we use keywords such as "stone" "marble" and "white marble" (we have lots of other keywords too but these will illustrate how the search engine works).
If you enter any of our keywords into the search engine the search engine will return the address of my page (a long with a lot of other sites!). Search engines go around the net looking for web sites that use META tags in order to build up a database of information on the World Wide Web. It is therefore necessary to use keywords when you search for information on the Internet.
Let's try an example using the Google search engine (http://www.google.com). Visit the search engine site and search for "marble" (No quote marks). On the day we did this, Google returned 36,900,000 possible entries. Our page is in there somewhere!
Rule Number 1: Use as explicit a search as you can.
Let's try again. Enter "white marble" (No quote marks). That returned 7,090,000 possibilities. Still a lot but we are narrowing it down! So what is the search engine actually searching for? It is searching for any site that contains the words "white" or "marble." So if there is a site that is concerned with marble, it will be included in the search. If there is a page about offering support to marble industry- it will be included, too.
We still need a way to trim this down as it is (potentially) including a lot of information that we are not interested in. What we really want to do is search for a listing that has "white marble" and just that - not the single words.
Try "white marble" but this time, include the quotation marks. So enter "white marble." This time, the search engine returned 1,250,000 entries - much better!
Rule Number 2: If you want to search for a phrase, enclose the whole phrase in quotation marks.
This is all well and good if you know the name of a page (or likely keywords), but sometimes you want to search for topics. For example, suppose you wanted to learn about "countertops". A search on" countertops" returns 6,280,000 possibilities. Not very good. How about if we refine the search to "white marble countertops"? If we use "white marble countertops" we will only get listings where those three words are together. What we want is to search for countertops made of white marble materials.
To do this, we need to use linking words. These are typically. Try this "white marble" AND "countertop." That brought the list down to 419,000. It's still too big for an effective search. This means, give us sites that contain the keywords "white marble" and "countertop". Both words must be present for the search to be included.
Rule Number 3: Use and or join words or phrases together and search site descriptions
We can also refine this further using . Try "white marble" "countertop" (with quotation marks). This gave us 272,000 listings. The plus symbol refines the search still further by making it a keyword search rather than descriptions as well. It ensures that ALL words are included or would include descriptions as well and tend to be used for phrases.
Using what we have learnt so far, we can refine this to find those sites that offer marble. Support on countertops.
Rule Number 4: Use the symbol for keyword searches that include ALL words listed
It is also possible on some search engines to ask questions rather than using keyword searches. Try this: "countertop" about "white marble" (include the quote marks).