Tue 19 Jun 2007
Getting frustrated with trying to find what you want online? Here are a couple of tips to help you get the most relevant results from of your favorite search engine.
- Search for an exact praise – By putting “quotation marks” around your search phrase you can ensure that the search engine only returns results with all the words you use, together and in the correct order.
- Advanced searches – Most search engines have an advanced search option. Clicking on this option will provide you with a number of ways to further refine your search such as which language, from which country and which file format you would like results to be.
Google also has a one page PDF of search tips specific to their search engine available for download here, but here is a quick summery.
| Type | Action | Example |
| - | Excludes search results with a particular word or phrase. | Cricket –insect returns results about cricket that do not relate to insects |
| ~ | Searches for a word and all its synonyms | ~mobile phone also returns results for cellular phone |
| OR | Searches for webpages that include either word | Holiday London OR Paris returns results with holiday and either London or Paris |
| … | Searches for a range of numbers | New Zealand 1910…1920 returns results for New Zealand during this time period. |