A search engine is a powerful tool that can help you find information quickly and efficiently. But, as the old acronym goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you enter a search term that is too general or ambiguous, you will get useless results. The more sophisticated you can make your searches, the more useful they will be.
Most search engines operate by searching through indices of web pages created either by robot spiders or by human submissions. When a search term is typed into a search box, the engine searches all of the indexed pages for matches and then ranks them to show the best results first. The methods that a particular search engine uses to rank its results differ, but all of them take into account the number and relevance of other web pages that link to the page being searched, as well as how the keywords used on the searched page match those of other indexed pages.
Search engine technology is continually improving to deal with the ever-increasing volume of data that is being gathered about the Internet and to filter out the irrelevant. It is also becoming more savvy at ignoring techniques such as keyword stuffing that try to artificially increase a search engine’s ranking.
You can improve the results that you are getting from a search by making use of a few simple techniques. The most basic of these is to limit the terms of your search by using quotation marks around a phrase. Search engines look for the words in a phrase exactly as you type them, so when you put words in quotes it tells the engine that you want to see only those results.
Another way to narrow your search is to include the AND or OR search operators in a query. This tells the engine to look for sites that contain both of the search terms you have entered (AND), or those that contain one of the search terms but not the other (OR).
If you have forgotten some word in your search, you can replace it with a wildcard character such as *. This will allow the search engine to substitute other words for that word in its results.
Many people use only the basic search engine functions that are built into their browsers or web-based email programs. However, search engines can do much more than that, and learning how to use the advanced functions will give you a lot more power over the information you are able to retrieve. Some of the tricks you will learn about here are for searching databases, but most of them will work on Internet search engines as well. There are even specialized search engines for specific types of files such as images, music, and video clips. The possibilities are endless. A good place to start is with Google, but there are many others available as well. Just remember that a search engine is only as good as the person typing the query into it, so don’t be afraid to experiment with different ones to find the right one for your needs.