1. Be Natural
Type in what you want to know, rather than a list of synonyms. Websites are written in flowing language, and search engines are being taught to understand the same.
| If you would’ve asked a fellow human “Is alphabet soup nutritious?“. Then ask the search engine “alphabet soup” nutritious rather than alphabet soup nutrition food health. |
2. Use Rare Words
The more unusual or uncommon the keywords you use are, the more specific the results will be. Taking a moment to think of a valid yet uncommon word is a valuable technique.
| alcohol returned 912,620 web pages vodka fetched 120,740 and it narrows down to 2754 pages when you enter Stolichnaya. |
- Note: For some engines the word order is important, so always enter the rare word first.
3. Most Important Word First
From personal experince with Google, I have found putting the word that is most important to your search in first, gets slightly better results
4. Exclude Words
By using a “-”.
| Say you sought the homepage of Bruce Willis, a plumber in Arkansas.
To avoid all the millions (actually 134,928) of pages dedicated to the film star, use this: “Bruce Willis” plumber Arkansas -”Die Hard” -movie -superstar -Demi |
5. Recognise Stop Words
Search engines ignore the most common words, in an effort to speed things up. Several hundred of these are deemed to be “stop words”. The vary from engine to engine, but always contain words like the of web a to in & is. It doesn’t matter whether they are embedded in a phrase or if they have a + before them, they will not be included in the search. Usually this doesn’t matter, but it is smart to be aware of the process.
Note: Google will find complete phrases, including stop words, when the phrase is “within quotes”. A phrase without quotes will ignore the stop words
| searching the web contains two stop words: the & web. Consequently the search engine will only look for “searching”. If you are aware of this, you can add a more relevant keyword to narrow your search, like: people search |
6. Reverse Questions
Search engines look for pieces of text that match your query. Web pages are more likely to contain answers than questions – so search for the answer. Phrase your query how you would expect the answer to read – the difference appears slight, but it makes a huge difference.
| “IRS stands for” rather than “What does IRS stand for?”
“man first landed on the moon in” rather than “When did man first land on the moon?” “sky is blue because” instead of “Why is the sky blue?” |
7. Dead Link Solutions
Try shortening the URL to the next subheading. Keep doing so until you get to the point that works. Then browse from there to see if you can track down the file that you want.
| If http://www.spock.com/jim/life/not_as_we_know_it.html returns an error, try http://www.spock.com/jim/life/ and if you still get an error, tryhttp://www.spock.com/jim/ and so on down to the root domain http://www.spock.com |
- Note: Google has most of the web cached. If a link is dead, clicking on the Cached link will bring up how it looked when it was indexed
- Note: Use The Wayback Machine to find historical copies of web pages
8. Huge Pages
Sometimes the reason a page appears in the results is because it is one very long page of text, briefly mentioning hundreds of subjects. Sometimes these are useful, such as in genealogical searches. Often they are not…
| In general, the most useful pages will be between 10k and 80k
To find that which you seek within a huge page, use the “Find in Page” option of your browser:
|