Google Search - Searching Techniques

Handy Techniques with Google Search

One of the most common online tasks people undertake every day, that can also be one of the most frustrating, is using a search engine such as Google Search to locate particular data; be that a specific website, details on a particular company, the bio of your favourite musician or actor, reviews of a film or book and so on. Point is, if you have an information need, that information probably sits out there in E memory somewhere, just waiting for you to pull it into focus for a short while if you key in the right search words.

The problem rests in getting at least fairly close to the data you are looking for. I think we have all had that sinking feeling of running a search and reading the fateful words where your search has returned hundreds of thousands of hits. So, in this post, I'm going to visit and refresh on some of the basic approaches to running successful searches in Google Search specifically (although these techniques are pretty universal so worth trying across different search engines). Of course, I realise that other engine flavours are out there - Bing I'm looking at you here - but, for the time being at least, I'm going to stick with Google Search.

Common Techniques in Google Search

Let's get started with the important job of making our searches more leaner and efficient:

1. To search for an exact match to a string of text, enclose your words within double quotations. Doing this forces Google Search to return matches on the entire string of text not just words that appear within the string.

   Example: I want to search for information on the film The Empire Strikes Back. Typing this in to Google Search without the double quotes nets me around 22,500,000 results. But, when I type in "the empire strikes back" the results are reduced considerably to approximately 727,000. This is because the search engine is forced to match the whole string, whereas without the quotes it will return results for combinations of the same words - though not necessarily the whole string.

2. To include and exclude certain words in your search, use the plus and minus symbols. Adding a plus symbol directly before a word informs the search engine to include results with that specific word. Adding a minus informs the search engine to ignore those results that contain that specific word.

   Example: As before, I can write "The Empire Strikes Back" into Google Search but this time around I can add +Boba - because I'm interested only in information specific to that character. When I run this I have a results list that is less than a hundred and from there I can narrow it further by adding -youtube, to exclude the information relating to You Tube. When I complete the latter, the search results narrow down to less than ten. From around 727,000 to under 10, that's not bad going...

3. If you don't know certain words you can include an asterisk to act as a wildcard.

   Example: While I recall that there was a film called the empire strikes ... something... I don't remember the full title. So, in Google Search input field I type in: "the empire strikes *" and run the search. Predictably, "Empire Strikes Back" results are well to the fore - though if you are interested in some of the alternatives, run the search including -back (minus back) and check the results. Fascinating - well, kind of!

4. If you have several words connected with your search and want to list the pages that mention any of them (as opposed to pages that only contain them all) you can use the capitalised word OR. This is useful when you want your results to list out web resources that contain at least one of the words perhaps from a list of several.

   Example: Yes, you guessed it - The Empire Strikes Back again, my search now though is "The Empire Strikes Back" R2D2 OR R2-D2. Running this search forces the return of results for The Empire Strikes Back with mentions specifically of R2, covering both spellings with, and without, the hyphen.

And there we are - a few extra methods to bear in mind when you are next visiting Google Search. Remember also to keep your search words concise and descriptive and don't be too worried about starting vague and then continuing to narrow down your results. Bear in mind that while some of the targeting techniques we have covered here are great for drilling down to more specifics, there are times when drilling down too far means you miss the information you are really looking for. As ever, the more you use these techniques the more you will get an instinctive feel for how best to approach your search engine work.

Have fun!