With the almost out of control profusion of online content, search navigation has become a truly crucial online skill. Especially for those who use the internet to help make their living, quickly and efficiently finding the best possible search results is indispensable. All search engines work on the same basic principles, but in the details they all operate a little differently from one another. Learning to use your search engine of choice like a true pro can make you an even better asset to your employer, and can be extremely useful in your day to day life, as well.
For those who want to sharpen their seeking skills, there are some search engine tip websites that offer really useful advice and teach some interesting tricks that casual users generally don’t know about. Here are some quick search engine tips that you can start using right away.
For instance, did you know that by putting a “plus” symbol in front of each search term, the engine will only return results that contain ALL of the terms you entered (as opposed to just some of them)? Using the “minus” symbol before a term does the opposite, meaning it makes the engine ignore any results that contain that term. Putting a complete phrase in quotation marks ensures that you’ll favor results where the terms appear in exactly the order you entered them.
How about some other, more advanced search engine tips? One common approach is Boolean searching. This method is basically a variation of the “search engine mat” described above, except using all caps language like “NOT,” “AND,” “OR,” or “NEAR” to change the way the search engine ranks the results you get.
These examples just scratch the surface of some of the fairly complex ways you can control a search, but there are plenty more search engine tips available on line if you want to expand your vocabulary of search commands and try some of these tricks out for yourself. All you have to do to find some of these great search engine tips is… search for them.