Improve Your Searching

Search Engines are a great tool, but often they can produce an overwhelming number of results that makes it harder to work out which are the best results for you.

There is no simple answer to this problem, in part it is a skill that comes with practice, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

However I was recently asked how to start on the process of being a better search engine searcher, so here are a few pointers:
I start by trying to define the search question as precisely as possible in as few words as possible, then I try to remove as many ‘superfluous ‘ words from the question to generate the keywords, these then become my search term

If I see a lot of unwanted results coming up, I exclude them by minus-ing them in the keyword list (plus means AND minus means NOT in logic operations for search engines)
example: I was fairly sure that google was now officially a verb and not just a casual expression, as in “I will google that”
initial (human) question
>> is google defined as a verb in the dictionary? <<
but search engines do not always understand sentences since they try to extract the keywords to search against so I reduced it to
>> google verb dictionary  <<
this worked, but lets assume I was getting a lot of results for google the company and google the website, to emphasise the keywords I did want and the keywords I did not want I could write the refined search as
>> google +verb +dictionary -website -company  <<
in logic terms this equates to google AND verb AND dictionary NOT website NOT company
Note: the advanced search feature on most search engines will do this for you, I just short-cut what they are doing

Sometimes you have to think laterally if your initial search is not producing the results you want
example, I was recently asked to help someone who had seen a craft bag on wheels with side pockets in a catalogue but it was out of stock, she tried searching online but was having no luck as the results kept giving the wrong sort of bags. So I looked at the picture in the catalogue, and saw it looked like the little pull-along bags I see at on my daily commute. So I searched
>> pull-handle travel bag pockets <<
and soon found a few likely candidates for her, it was a case of thinking not ‘what is it called ‘ but rather ‘what is it and what can it be used for.