The more relevant words you use in your search, the more successful your results will be.
For example, typing in coffee when trying to find a coffee shop in Michigan provides too many unnecessary results. When you need to draw a black cat, typing cat doesn't help either.
However, modifying it slightly to include the type of coffee or cat you want and the specific location or color you're looking for is often enough to provide the results you want.
It's good to use natural language in web searches, as you can see in this screenshot, because good search engines filter out unnecessary "common" words and select important terms like location and Other definition words.
Another great tip for getting better search results is to use quotation marks to group words together. When you do this, you are telling the search engine that everything within the quotes should be grouped as it is in the results.
When you use quotes to search the web, you significantly reduce the number of results the search engine shows you, creating a highly focused set of results.
Here's an example where we group two sets of words so that each set of words is searched as you type it here:
"Los Angeles" "apartments for rent"
This shows results that contain Los Angeles, rather than other pages that might contain "los" or "angeles," such as Los Pinos, Los Cocos, Angeles National Forest, etc.
The same goes for the second half. Since we want to find apartments for rent, and we want to avoid other situations where houses and apartments are for rent, we use quotation marks to get better results, making sure these three words are next to each other.
Using quotes is great for finding very specific content and should reduce the results you see. However, if you cram a lot of words between quotes, you might truncate too many results, including useful results that aren't worded exactly like your search. Start with fewer words and build up from there.
Not all search engines are created equal. There are many ways to serve a specific purpose, so if "normal" methods (like Google, Bing, or Yahoo) aren't enough to find what you're looking for, consider a completely different approach.
An example of this is an audio search engine, where a website or application is built specifically for finding audio files, whether they are sound clips, music, effects, etc. For example, search engines are not helpful if you only focus on videos or images. Looking for music files.
People search engines are also available, as well as image search engines, invisible web search engines, job search engines, torrent search engines, and more. Niche search engines may also be helpful.
If you've ever visited a website that doesn't have its own search tool, or you've failed to use it, one way to get better results is to use Google. This may sound like an unlikely solution, but Google actually lets you narrow down your results to only show pages from the specific website you choose.
This web search tip involves Google's "Site" search option. Here's an example of what we're looking for on Lifewire:
site:lifewire.com social media
The same technique works for limiting results to a specific top-level domain, such as GOV:
site:gov "ron paul"
Another seemingly simple web search tip is to use subtraction to make search results more relevant. This is called a Boolean search and is one of the guiding principles by which most search engines build their search results.
Let's say you're searching for Tom Ford, but you get a lot of results for Ford Motors. This problem can be easily solved by combining the quoting trick learned above with the minus sign/hyphen key:
"tom ford" -motors
Results now only include pages mentioning Tom Ford, and the search engine removed those pesky car results.
As you filter the results, if you find other words or phrases you don't want to see, feel free to add them to the search using the minus sign key to refine it more and more.
A website or webpage that is temporarily or permanently closed is not necessarily inaccessible. From time to time, you can access a cached version of a page or browse an archived copy of it.
Not all web pages are cached, but Google provides an easy way to check. You can do this if the site doesn't open for any reason (for example, the site was removed, or it doesn't load properly due to overload of traffic).
However, the caching option on Google does not work for very old web pages. Another way to search for a website that is no longer running on the Internet is to find it on the Wayback Machine.
Most search engines have advanced options that you can use to get better results. I've covered a few of them above, but it's important to know that there are often many more available.
Yahoo search is a simple example. When you search for images on the site, you can select the specific color, size, and type of image you're looking for. Video search is similar, but allows you to select length, resolution, and source.
Many web search tools have advanced options. You can see some examples in our list of Bing advanced search tips articles.
A handy advanced search option to run on Google is Find Files. You can use Google to find PDFs, Word documents, and other types of files.
For other sites, look around the search bar for "Filters , " "Advanced ," " Tools , " "More Options," or similar buttons/menus.
Most search engines allow you to use wildcards to expand a broader search net. Doing this allows you to communicate with the search engine that it can replace the wildcard with whatever it wants.
A wildcard character might be an asterisk (*), a hashtag (#), or a question mark (?), but the asterisk is the most common.
Here is an example, we want to search for truck rentals in California, but we don't specify where in the state the rental company must be located.
"best truck rental in * california"
We will get better results with quotes as we are looking for a list showing all the best truck rental companies in various areas.
Here is a similar search that changes the results dramatically, showing us a variety of rental businesses, but only in San Jose.
"best * rental" "san jose"
Effective web searching involves more than just the skill of using a search engine. Once you land on a page you found through a web search, you may still have trouble finding what you're looking for.
Fortunately, every web browser allows you to perform a keyword search on this page. This is somewhat similar to the site search you learned above, but instead of just locating pages that contain those words, this technique shows you exactly where on the page the keyword appears.
To do this, use the Ctrl + F (Windows) or Command + F (Mac) keyboard shortcut to get a prompt asking for what you're looking for. Most mobile browsers also support a find feature, usually hidden in a menu.
For example, if you end up on a web page about the person you're researching and you want to quickly see if the page mentions anything about the year 2005, you can use the shortcut to enter 2005 . This will highlight every instance on the page and let you quickly jump to each row.
Don't fall into the rut of using just one search engine for all your web searches. Google isn't the only company doing this. In fact, in addition to the unique search engines mentioned above, there are several alternative search engines for general web searches.
Bing, Yahoo, Startpage.com, Yandex, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo are some examples.
If one search engine doesn't help you find what you're looking for, you may get better results using another search engine. Some of them use different algorithms and have unique filtering options that can ultimately show you different results than others.
If you're not sure which one to use, consider Dogpile. It combines several of them into one to help you get better results without having to jump to different websites.
