Are your search engine results leaving you frustrated and bewildered? Are the results served up with all the finesse of a machete when what you really want is keyhole surgery? Read on…
Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. True, advanced search options do provide users with a greater degree of control. But how often are these advanced options not quite the ones we really want?
They’re close but not quite on the mark. In the same way, perhaps, as many of those interactive telephone services where you’re asked to choose one of the following four options, none of which is exactly what you want. So you choose one that’s sort of in the right neighbourhood, but four sets of options later you are so wide of the mark you have to speak to an agent anyway.
Search engines, meanwhile, can similarly take users down lots of blind alleyways as we drill down through a large collection of not-on-the-money results, only to conclude that we need to start again completely from scratch. What would be handy is a set of laser-guided tools to go directly to the information we need.
The good news is they are here on about.com. What you will find is a set of virtual skeleton keys to unlock precisely the data you need from a search engine. There are keys to get your hands on everything from the climate, driving directions and maps to population figures and lots more besides.
And you don’t even have to press the hash key or work out the fifth character of your password.
