Stop Searching, Start Finding - How To Put Your Web Search On Steroids
Here’s a number of powerful tips to help propel your web search and
discovery skills to new levels. These are very simply concepts that
you can begin implementing right now.
So let’s go ahead and get started.
Web Search Tip #1: Add A ‘Discovery’ Keyword To Your Search
Here are some ‘discovery’ keyword examples:
tips
articles
guide
checklist
FAQs
resources
So, instead of searching for ‘paris travel’, search for
‘paris travel tips’, ‘paris travel articles’, ‘paris travel
guide’, and so on. Instead of searching for ‘buying a home’,
search for ‘buying a home tips’, or ‘buying a home guide’.
You’ll be amazed at the jump in quality search results you’ll
get. Try it right now:
http://www.google.com
Web Search Tip #2: Add Relevant Keywords To Your Search
For example, let’s say you’re looking for information
related to ‘gardening’. If you go to your favorite search
engine and simply enter ‘gardening’ as your query, you’ll
get a ton of general, mostly useless, results.
But if you add relevant keywords to your search, you can
easily narrow your results, depending on the type
of gardening information you’re looking for:
organic gardening
indoor gardening
rose gardening
vegetable gardening
You can narrow your results even further by adding more
relevant keywords to your search:
organic herb gardening
indoor organic gardening
organic vegetable gardening
Web Search Tip #3: Related Searches
For example, if you’re looking for information about
Germany travel, can you think of any keywords that might
help you find information related to Germany travel?
How about:
Oktoberfest
Berlin
Rhine River
Black Forest
Castles
Would knowing these keywords and searching for
information about them help in your quest for
information about Germany travel?
More than likely, yes!
So, how do you come up with keywords that are related to
your main search?
An easy way is to head over to a search engine at
www.gigablast.com, and search for your original keyword
there.
When you do this, at the top of the results page,
Gigablast displays a series of terms it calls Giga Bits,
which are terms related to the term you’re searching for.
Any of these terms can be clicked on as a basis for a
new, but related search. This is a very unique and
powerful feature of Gigablast.
Web Search Tip #4: Search A Specific Domain
For example, if I’m looking for information related to
Tiger Woods, why search the entire web when www.golf.com
probably has all the information you need?
By narrowing your search to a specific site, related to
your keyword(s), you can quickly eliminate the millions of
pages of clutter that a general web search inherently brings
with it.
You can still use Google to do your search (you can search
for “Tiger Woods” on www.golf.com), you just need to enter
your search in the following way:
“tiger woods” site:golf.com
Notice the addition of: site:golf.com
This tells Google to confine your search to only pages on
www.golf.com.
Here’s a few more examples of searching for ‘Tiger Woods’
on specific domains:
“tiger woods” site:cnn.com
“tiger woods” site:golfchannel.com
“tiger woods” site:foxsports.com
Try these queries yourself to get a feel for how it works.
Web Search Tip #5: Search Shortcuts
The Big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Ask) all offer
search shortcuts. They may call them different things, but
they essentially all work the same.
Here’s how:
If you want the weather for your zip code, head over to
Google, and enter the following:
weather 47401
or on Yahoo, do it this way:
weather Berlin
Want a definition for a word? Google, Yahoo, and Ask will
all allow you to find it quickly by entering your search
the following way:
define wifi
The addition of the term ‘define’ to your query tells the
search engine you’re looking for a definition for the word
that follows.
These are just a couple of the dozens of search shortcuts
the various search engines provide.
With search shortcuts you can quickly find:
The weather
Flight information
Movie showtimes
Gas prices for a zip code
Scores for a particular sports team
Exchange rates
Hotels information for a city or zip code
and much more…
Here are links to the shortcut homepages of the Big 3
search engines. Try these out for yourself. They can be
real time-savers.
Google:
http://www.google.com/help/features.html
Yahoo:
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/
Ask:
http://help.ask.com/en/docs/about/site_features.shtml
Conclusion
You’re now armed with some very powerful techniques on how
to find the information/content you want online. You just need to
use them.
Searching the web really doesn’t have to be difficult.
Happy searching and discovering!
Gilles Cote is an expert at finding stuff online and a self proclaimed information junkie. To discover even more powerful web search tips, visit his lens at http://www.squidoo.com/websearchmadeeasy/
Tags: how to find anything, Research Tools, search tips, web search, web search tips, web search tool
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