search engines
| "Time waiting is money wasted" is an adage that will be familiar and all too real to most entrepreneurs in today's hectic business culture.
Doubtless too that this phrase has taken on new meaning when searching for that vital nugget of information on the internet. But with a few neat tricks, it is possible to zero in on your online prey without extracting a seven-figure tsunami of results from your favourite search engine. By refining a search and giving careful thought to search terms, finding what you are looking for can easily take half the time it would otherwise entail. Getting to grips with search engine techniques is not only useful personal development, it is also beneficial in understanding how potential customers would search for your company website. Knowing too how users interact with the major search engines will be helpful when it comes to submitting your site for a search engine listing or fine-tuning keywords to optimise your ranking. By heeding the following search engine tips, you are guaranteed to drastically cut search times and spare yourself a lot of online frustration. Speling is importent Now, this probably sounds transparently obvious, but always ensure your spelling is correct and key in the search term carefully. If in doubt, open a text document and test it out with the spell checker. Many search engines will provide a prompt if they think your spelling is unconventional. The right tool for the job You wouldn't use a sledgehammer to push in a drawing pin, so selecting the right tool for searching on the net is just as important. If your search is country-specific, check you are using the UK site of your favourite search engine, e.g. Yahoo! UK and Ireland instead of Yahoo! com. The dot com version of a search engine will pull up results from all over the globe. Most of the better-known engines have country specific sites, which you can access directly from the main home page, or they invite you to focus your search with radio buttons. In a rut? Experiment with a variety of search engines. It's all too easy to stick with one or two favourites. There are lots of search engines around and they use various means to index the web, so try doing the same search on several and compare their results. Over time, you will narrow down which search engines consistently retrieve the best results for you. Be sure to bookmark them for easy access from your desktop. Word search Search engines aren't clairvoyant. So save yourself a lot of grief by choosing your words carefully. For instance, if you wanted to buy a second hand Ford Cargo lorry be specific and search using the search term To narrow down our quest for a Ford Cargo lorry, the next strategy is to use double quote marks and search like this "Ford Cargo for sale"-horseboxes. This tells the search engine to look only for documents containing the exact phrase, but none containing the word, horsebox. For this type of search, however, most search engines now insist you click on their Advanced Search option and fill in a specially created form to help add and subtract parameters. The Advanced Search is not so unfriendly as it sounds, and gives many extra controls over the outcome of your search. Set the controls Yahoo!, for example, enables advanced searches to be conducted by date. With this you are given choices to set a span time to help weed out dated material. Other types of advanced search engine options include setting a search to only include pages in certain languages or confining a further search to within the existing results. As well as 'search within', it is also possible to conduct a fresh search based on a document that is relevant but not quite what you are looking for. This normally appears as 'find similar' or 'query by example'. Thingamajig Frequently, though, we may be searching for something but can't remember the name or have the proper terminology. Fortunately, this all too familiar human frailty has been taken care of. Some search engines aren't, strictly speaking, search engines at all - they're directories. Yahoo! is one. Just35.com is another. These let you search by topic, with each topic or category sub-divided until you arrive at your goal. Directories are compiled by humans, unlike search engines, which deploy software, and tend to be more general than search engines. By using these tips, searching on the net may never be the same again. Nor as time consuming. |