Tips
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.
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?
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!
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!
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.
Quicksearch in Firefox
If you are using Mozilla Firefox, you can quickly search the web using the box in the top-right corner of the browser. Click on the icon to the left of the box to easily switch between search engines. Some of the defaults include Google, Yahoo! and Amazon. You can even add your own if you [...]
Using Google to answer simple questions
As well as being a great search engine, Google can also answer some basic questions you might have without having to visit a different site. Google will automatically pick up many simple queries and attempt to answer them. In most cases, the results if you were to search for the query appear below the answer as well, just like a normal search. You may have noticed this when searching for basic information, but have you tried it for definitions or phone numbers? Keep reading for some more examples of how Google can quickly help you out…
Shortcuts
In most Windows programs, you can jump to the search function by pressing F3 or Ctrl-F. Once you have run your search, F3 or ‘Find Next’ will continue to cycle through the document looking for the search term.
