Efficiency Tip #86 – Learn To Search

There are two things you will do on the Internet.

1 – Find stuff.
2 – Buy, look at, read, download or interact with stuff you find.

You can drastically reduce the “finding” time if you learn the secrets of your search engine.  If you use Google (most people do), here is a link to the advanced search help page.

http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html

Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of search engines.  Check the “help” page for specific search terms if you are using something other than Google. Years ago I used AltaVista as my main search engine.  I didn’t switch to Google until after 2002 because the operators were different and I had already memorized all the shortcuts for AltaVista.  Eventually, the Google database had so much more information, I switched.  At some point in my life I will probably have to switch again.

There are two “operators” that I use most – quotes and the plus sign.

The quotes force the results to match your search word-for-word.

This search:

“alvin trusty”

has 359 results.  All of them have my first name immediately followed by my last name.

This search:

alvin trusty

has 67,800 results.  There are more listings because Google is not forced to find both words in sequence.  Actually, the search results will not necessarily have both words.

To force a word to show up in a search, put a plus sign in front of it.

This search:

+alvin +trusty

has 67,500 hits.  Apparently the previous search had 300 pages with only one of the two terms.  I think the Google database has gotten so big, almost all searches return results with all the terms.  It is as if the plus sign is always used in front of every term.

The minus is also helpful.  Sometimes there is one word you do not want in the results.  The minus keeps that word out.

chicago bears -teddy

will remove the word “teddy” from all results.  In the above search, that’s over a million pages you will not have to look at.

Here is a YouTube video I created last year that shows these search tips plus a few more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLxRe_fx8I

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