Technique
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…
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…
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…
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…
Using multiple search engines
As each search engine uses a different algorithm to process and prioritise your results, you will find that each one will present a different set of results. Rather than one being necessarily ‘better’ than the others, using these in combination will let you find a lot more information than you would using one exclusively…
Refining search results using quotes, plus and minus
The number of results returned by a search engine can be truly immense, with most common searches giving hundreds of thousands of options to choose from, if not millions. Some of these results are relevant, some less so and some completely off target. To improve the relevance of your results, it helps to be a bit more specific with your query. Using quote marks, plus signs and minus signs are a good way to do this…
