Make Your Google Search Effective

One of my biggest pet-peeves in this world is when I have someone come up to me and tell me they can't find something they are looking for online. I see absolutely no reason why they could not find what they are looking for. The normally end up asking me to try, and I type it right in Google and normally find the result within the first page, if not, the second page. So, in this post I'm going to cover the basics to executing an effective search to help you return the results you want.

Background

Basically, when you search on any search engine you are making an assisted database query. Now for anyone who doesn't know what a database query is; it is basically a statement that talks to a database and asks it to return specific pieces of data contained in the database. Queries can take many useful operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. These operators help you to narrow the results down to exactly what you are looking for.

Search Basics

Generally speaking, you will never really even use the operators that I mentioned earlier. The most important thing when making a search is to use the the right search terms. When you make a search, you type in something like "Make a search" if you were looking for a page like this blog post. The search engine views this search as a statement like this "make AND search" Basically, what this means is that the search engine makes a query that finds anything with the words "make" and "search" in the page.

One important thing to note is that many search engines will omit, or ignore, common words such as "what", "where", "how", and single letters and digits. It is possible to force Google to include these words or numbers by placing a "+" sign in front of the word or by conducting a phrase search,which I will discuss later.

Certain attributes of conducting searches are specific to the search engine system you are conducting your search on. Some of these considerations are things such as capitalization and pluralization. Google is not a case-sensitive search engine, so searching for "Make Searches" is the same as searching for "make searches"

Pluralization ties into an attribute that is known as word stemming; this is basically searching for variations of words that you search for. When you make your search for "Make searches", Google may also search for variations like "Making searches", "Makes searches", "Make searching", "Make search". Now these variations can become quite numerous, as you can imagine. This is why it is important to choose the terms of your search wisely.

I have covered the basic considerations you should make when you are choosing search terms, but now I am going to cover a process that will help you to properly choose the search terms to make you search as effective as possible. First, obviously, think of what you want to find. Let's say I wanted to find a page with the Academic Calendar for Oklahoma State University. So, after deciding what it is you need to find, you need to pick out search terms. I normally try to follow the following format for picking search terms.

"What" "Where" "Specifics and Limits"

In the "What" section, I use terms that describe what I want to find. In this case, I would use the terms "Academic calendar". Simple enough, right? Then I move on to the next section, the "Where", many times when you search there may not be anything in the "Where" section. But, in this case, we only want the academic calendar from Oklahoma State University. One thing you should consider in this section, is the school's acronym "OSU", while many people may just use the acronym as the search term for the "Where" section. While, using the acronym is perfectly fine to use, you must also remember that Oklahoma State is not the only school that uses OSU as an acronym, there is also Ohio State and Oregon State. As you can see, by using the acronym you will provide yourself with many more results that you are not looking for, the basic rule is the more specific your terms are, the more precise your results will be. The last section of the search is the specifics or limits, this is the section of the search when you would add things such as common words not to ignore by adding a plus sign, like I discussed earlier, or setting limits as to which sites to search. I will discuss many of these limits in the section about Advanced Search Techniques.

Advanced Search Techniques

Now that I have covered the basics to building a search that can provide useful results, I will cover some of the more advanced techniques for building even more precise search parameters. Please keep in mind that some of these techniques may work on different search engines, I have focused this post towards performing a search on the Google search engine. The first item I will cover is using a phrase search, this is a relatively basic idea. In a normal search for "Make Searches" the search engine will make a query such as "Make" AND "Searches" searching for both words, but they do not have to be next to each other. A phrase search is a search where you put a phrase such as an exact name or lyrics to a song in quotes and then the search engine will not add AND statements between each term, but rather search for the exact phase in that order.

The next idea I am going to introduce to you is the idea of negative terms, these are terms that are preceded with a minus symbol. These terms are useful when you are search for something that could be multiple different things, such as "shell" this could be in reference to a shell on the beach or a shell on a turtle. If you were looking for something involving a shell from the beach you could search for "shell -turtle" and this would give you all the results containing the word "shell" that don't contain "turtle."

If you need to search for a term that may have multiple words that mean similar things, then you could perform a synonym search by adding the "~" symbol in front of the word you want a search for. This will search for the term you provided as well as any synonyms of that word.

A couple of other methods for conducting a search are by using a domain search, which will conduct your search on only the domain you provide. After entering in your search terms, you add "site:" and then the domain you want to search in. For example to search for the owner of the company withing Serenity Design's site you could enter something like "Owner site:serenitydesignonline.com"

The last advanced technique I am going to cover is the OR statement. The OR statement is useful when you are searching for something could come up under one of two or more terms, or if you are looking for a couple different things in one search. If you were looking for the owner of the company and the portfolio for Serenity Design; you could perform the search "owner OR portfolio site:serenitydesignonline.com"

Conclusion

Well, by now you should be able to perform some very advanced searches on Google and various other search engines. Many of these ideas and techniques will work perfectly on different search engines. Please remember that just because you know these techniques does not always mean you should use them. I had a teacher a long time ago who lived by an idea that has stuck with me he called it the "KISS" method; this stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. This idea can be applied to all aspects of your life, so please keep it simple.

Well now that you can perform searches like a pro, you will probably begin to notice all the things people around you ask that could be solved simply with a search. You can wither choose to ignore the question, or you could point them to this post. Although, if the same person consistently asks you questions that they could have found themselves please feel free to go here: http://www.letmegooglethatforyou.com this site will let you type in the search that this person should have done themselves, and produces a link for you to give them that shows them how to type it in, and then asks them if that was really that hard, then transfers them to the google search page. Check it out, it's a fun little tool.

Well, that concludes my first post on this site, check back soon. I am going to try and post as often as possible about technology, ideas and thoughts about Serenity Design, and other random things.