Search engine techniques are ways of improving the accuracy and relevance of your search results. While these techniques will vary by search engine, most are easy to learn and can be applied to most web sites.
1. Create a topic model
The first step to creating your search engine strategy is to consider the concept you wish to search for. This could be a person, an event or an idea.
Then, you need to decide on the relevant keywords that you want to use. These should be derived from your topic, and will help to guide your content.
2. Combine the keywords using Boolean operators
Once you have your keyword combinations, you need to create a query that uses these words. By combining them with the appropriate operator, you will create a more precise search. This will narrow down your results and make them more relevant to you.
3. Add a time frame to your search
Some search engines allow you to specify a date range for the information you are looking for. This is useful if you are searching for something that happened in the past, but not necessarily in the present or future.
4. Use quotation marks when defining your terms
Quotation marks around the search term you are using can significantly reduce the number of results you get. This is especially useful if you are searching for specific information, or if you want to exclude certain things from the result set.
5. Use truncation when searching for particular words
If you don’t truncate your search word, it will look for the word in exactly the way that you entered it into the search box. This can be particularly useful if you are searching in another language and have a different spelling of the word.
6. Apply keyword techniques like truncation and wildcards
There are a lot of different ways to get more relevant results from your search engine, but some methods work better than others. These techniques include truncation, wildcards and a range of other strategies.
7. Organize your searches for more effective results
The most efficient way to organize your searches is to start with the most important phrase you want to search for and then group related phrases together in order of importance. This will allow the search engine to find the most relevant documents for you.
8. Refine your queries with quotes and brackets
The search engine will use the quotation marks you put around the search terms to group them together. This allows it to find documents that contain all of the terms you have specified, and to find them in the correct order.
9. Apply truncation when searching for individual words
This will significantly improve your search results, as the search engine will only find documents that contain all of the terms you are looking for. This will also prevent it from generating results for the same document with different words used in the title.