Simon Goudie
Playing the Wildcard
In many search applications an asterisk * serves as a wild card and can mean anything. For example, searching for ‘mas*’ would return results for mask, mash and masculine, amond others. Try experimenting with wild cards to increase the power of your searches.
Searching through Twitter
When the Fail Whale stays away, the microblogging tool Twitter is a great way to see what is currently on the minds and in the conversations of people online. As with any great source of information, the ability to search and retrieve data is the key to using it to its potential and Twitter is no different.
Searching blogs with Google Blog Search
A lot of people aren’t aware of this yet, but one of Google’s Beta projects is a blog search engine. Blogs have an interesting place in traditional search results – because there are so many blogs and the signal-to-noise ratio is so high, it can be difficult to search through all the blog results in your search to find the actual information. Also, because of the speed that blogging moves at, finding the latest and most relevant blog entries can be difficult in traditional searches. Google Blog Search makes it much easier to search through blog entries and to narrow down your results…
Let information find you
Searching for information is all well and good, but if you’re interested in a topic, you’d probably like to follow the developments of that topic as they happen. Using search engines and remembering everything you’ve read is impractical, so why not let the information come to you as it is available?
8 things you probably aren’t searching for… but should be
There can often be more to a search engine than meets the eye. Sometimes, thinking a little bit outside the box when looking for information can yield some interesting results. Here’s eight things that you should be using search engines for, but probably aren’t…
Twitter search
Use Twitter and would like to search through the incredible amount of conversation going on? Terraminds’ Twitter search is for you. Just enter the search term or username you want to find and see what tweets are out there!
Understanding Google Advanced Search
Google’s Advanced Search screen can look a bit daunting at first, but offers some very powerful options to help you make the most of your search. I’ll go through the page from top to bottom, so follow along…
Fill in the blanks
Can’t quite remember a quote or song lyric? Just plug what you do remember into a search engine and leave out what you forget – in many cases this will bring up the exact lines you were looking for. Don’t forget to use quote marks if you know a string of words exactly!
Targeted searching using Google operators
Prefixing your search terms in Google with any of the recognised operators is a great way to streamline your searching. The more information you have about your target, the more specific you can make your query…
Asterisk
Use an asterisk (*) in your search criteria to indicate something unknown. Example: search* will return results based on searching, searches, searcher, search engine and so on, as well as those for simply search.
