©MonZaeMon™ 69 - Welcome to increasers.com’s video tutorial series. In this video, we will discuss ways in which you can improve your internet search results.
Doing a search on the internet has become a modern staple of life in the 21st century. People can find virtually any information they could wish to find; and it can take mere seconds or longer, depending on the topic and the person looking for it.
A simple search engine search will, most often, produce the results we’re looking for. However often times our simple searches come up empty, or worse, there are so many results we can’t look through all of them; and many have nothing to do with what we want. To sift through the results we don’t need, in order to find the ones we do, we can apply different web search tricks that refine our search and narrow down the results we get.
The first tip is the most straight forward; keep your search inquiries short and to the point.
The Importance of Keywords
A search engine produces results based, in part, on what we type into the search field – this text is called “keywords”; which are words or phrases that define a site and make it unique among different types of websites. If an online store sells products for driver education, like Newdrivingschool.com, you will have numerous references to driver education, as well as the different products they sell. The repetition of these keyword on the site are then picked up by the different search engines that review them; and the site then becomes associated with those keywords, so that, when combined with certain other variables, the site will be displayed as a web search result when certain keywords are searched for. The more specific you can be with the keywords you use in a search, the better results you’ll get. Anticipating what words the person building the site you’re looking for would have used, will increase the likelihood of producing results that lead to that site.
Refining Your Search Results
Just as using some terms are important to finding the right results, not using certain terms and characters can be important too. For starters, for most common words, it’s not necessary to include synonyms, or words with similar meanings, in a web search. Most search engines will automatically look for matches to sites that use keywords with similar definitions. A web search for the word “automobile,” will produce results for websites that use the word :”car” as a primary keyword.
Search engines can find proper websites based on single words or partial phrases; so complete sentences with punctuation is not necessary and words like “but,” “if” or “the,” are superfluous in most case. Search engines will however look for matches for everything typed into the field, and some more common keywords, while normally negligible in the effects in a web search, can fundamentally change the criteria of your search through their inclusion or omission. Say you do a web search for the keyword “doctor,” this will produce a search results list of sites that talk about medicine and the profession of the different kinds of doctors. A search for the phrase, “the Doctor,” will more likely produce results detailing a popular, long running science fiction series on the BBC.
The Use operators
The next step to refine you’re search is to incorporate operators into your search. Operators are characters or commands that define how a search is done. One of the most common operators is the use of quotation marks around keywords or groups of keywords, which tells the search engine the words should be kept grouped together. You can even have separate groups of keywords, each within their own quotation marks.
The And, Or, and Not
Additional operators to know are certain words that, when used as operators, must be typed in all caps; these include AND, OR and NOT. Typing these words all in caps tells the search engine to treat the words as a command, which defines how the search is down, and not as another keyword to search for. The operator OR is used when you have more than one keyword or sets of keywords that you want to find information on either one or the other. Putting different groups of keyword phrases within quotations and typing OR between them will produces search results that use either the first set of keywords, or the other, or both when the match applies. A search for [college “low tuition” OR “job placement”] will show results for sites that have college information on just “low tuition,” while others only talk about “job placement,” and others still talk about both.
The NOT operator will exclude a keyword or grouped keywords, from being matched during a search. Doing a search for a used laptop, might produce results for laptops are that broken and need repair, where as you want a cheap, working laptop you can use. Using the word NOT, followed by common keywords associated with the broken items – like “as is,” “for parts,” etc – will remove those keywords from the search results. Another way to apply this operator is with the minus symbol. This character immediately followed by a keyword or phrase will likewise prevent that data from being matched in the search. It’s important that, in the event of using this operator; to always have a space prior to the minus sign, to distinguish between a symbol for the NOT operator and a common hyphenated word.
The word AND, all in caps, is also an operator that tells search engines how to behave. As the word might suggest, this operate tells the search engine that the terms being searched immediately following the keywords, must be kept as part of the search criteria and any results must include that phrase or keyword. This is likewise done using the plus symbol.
The Use of Symbols
Finally, an important operator is the asterisk symbol. This symbol is used to fill in where people doing a search and they aren’t sure, or don’t remember, a full name or description of what they’re looking for. Replacing what you don’t know or can’t recall with an asterisk, tells search engines to do a search based on the rest of the keywords and look for any matches that fills in the missing details wherever you placed the asterisk.
With each refinement and additional tip applied to your search, the search results get narrowed down; until finally the information you’re looking for is found.
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