I was doing a little bit of keyword research the other day, and I came across some data about how many people are searching for instructions on how to search the internet.  At first, it might seem that such a search is a lot like walking up to someone and asking them how to talk.  The reality is, however, that there’s a lot more to internet searching than just typing a few words into the search query box of your favorite search engine.  For instance, did you know that searches on Google are not case specific?  If you search for Goats and goats, Google would return the same set of results (without even asking why you might be searching for goats in the first place).  Also, common words (like the, a, I, etc) are removed from your search.

Okay, I’ll admit that’s not exactly Earth-shattering stuff, but I bet you haven’t heard of a few of these tricks:

 1)  If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotations marks.  For example, searching for “I know it’s smelly” will return several results containing that exact phrase.  Searching for that phrase without the quotes returns an entirely different set of results.

2)  Google and other search engines use the “AND” operator by default.  That is, they return only those results that are related to all of the words you’ve searched for (except the ”common” words discussed above).  If you want to search for either one word or another, use the “OR” operator.  For eample, if you’re looking for a new American sports car, you might search for: sports car Ford OR Chevrolet.  That will bring you a list of pages about sports cars that mention Ford, or mention Chevrolet.  If you did a search for: sports car Ford Chevrolet, you’d get a list of pages about sports cars that mention Ford and Chevrolet.

3)  Have you ever been to a website that didn’t allow you to search its pages?  No problem!  Let your favorite search engine do it.  You can restrict your searches to specific sites by using the “site:” modifier.  So, if I want to find an old shot of myself in my previous life as an oceanographer, I would go to Google, Yahoo!, or MSN and search for: brian darrow site:usf.edu.  This would result in a search for my name, but the only pages returned would be from the usf.edu domain.

4)  You can also eliminate things from your search.  You’ve probably been doing a lot of research about baseball lately and you’re sick and tired of those major league baseball sites cluttering your search results.  I feel your pain, and I give you the “-” operator.  Try searching for: baseball.  Then, search for: baseball -mlb.  Notice how the results are different.

5)  With Google, you can use the “~” symbol to include synonyms in your search.  Search for: ocean.  Then, search for: ~ocean.  Notice how the words “ocean” and “sea” are both highlighted in the results.  That’s similar to doing a search for: ocean OR sea, except that now you’re letting Google find the synonyms for ocean.  There may be others that you haven’t thought of.

For the most part, search engines are pretty smart.  You can usually just type a few words in the search box and get a pretty good list of websites that have exactly the information you’re looking for.  Every once in a while, though, you’ll run into one of those tricky searches and the 5 tips above just might come in handy.    

The most entertaining minute and a half I have had recently online is here:

This guy paints Bruce Lee without a brush, with his body parts, on high speed. Very cool.