Whether you’re looking for a job, a local business, scholarly articles or any other type of information online, search engines are the way to go. There are many different search engine techniques that you can use to improve the quality of your results and save time when searching. The more specific and relevant your search terms are, the better your results will be.
When you enter a search term into a search engine, it will try to match those words against a database of known information and return the most relevant results. Search engines use complex algorithms to determine how to rank web pages and what results they should show to searchers.
Some common search engine techniques are the use of quotes around a phrase, the AND operator and the OR operator. When using quotes, a search engine will treat those words as if they are all connected and only return documents that contain all of the searched keywords. This is often useful when you are searching for an exact phrase and want to narrow your search results.
The AND operator is used when you want the search engine to find any documents that contain both of your searched terms. For example, search engines will typically return documents that contain the words “49ers” and “schedule.” Using the OR operator can help you narrow your results by finding documents that contain either of the keywords or both.
By using the NOT operator, you can prevent a search engine from returning documents that contain certain words. For example, if you are looking for recipes that include sugar cookies, you could search with the NOT operator “sugar cookie.”
Sometimes, you may only be interested in searching for documents created or updated during a certain time period. Most search engines allow you to limit your results by entering a date range into the query box. For example, you could search for “before June 5” or “after July 31.” This is especially useful when you are looking for current information that is not yet available on the internet.
Many search engines have multiple ways to limit your searches, and the options differ from one database to another. Some offer you the option to choose which part of a document you want to search, while others limit searches to titles, URLs or even entire web pages.