Cross referencing the results and finding similar sites at the top suggests these sites most accurately fit your criteria, while finding sites on one engine and not the other may suggest that these sites are coming from a different angle in relation to the search criteria, or serve a different purpose. Alternatively, there may be a more nefarious reason a site does not appear in each set of results. Comparing both sites may lead you to information that you otherwise may have missed and avoid some sites that you would be better off ignoring.

For example, searching for peanut butter on Microsoft Live, Google and Yahoo! returns a number of different results. Some of these are represented across all three engines and might be worth considering first. Broadly speaking, the remaining results tend to fall into a few different areas that, depending on why you searched for peanut butter, may be of more relevance:

(note that this is just one example and the recommendations may not hold true for other types of searches)

Using multiple search engines can also help to identify and avoid spam sites that have been specifically set up to feature highly in a particular search engine’s results. For example, if a site full of advertising has been engineered to feature highly in Google search results to lure people in to click on ads, the same site may not appear on the other engines.

For most people, their search engine of choice will come down to personal preference: what works best for them, what kinds of sites they prefer to look at, what gives them the information they need the quickest and what other services the site offers. However, by combining the efforts of multiple search engines, we can often get a more complete picture of what is available online that suits our needs and at the same time, check the validity of the results that are returned.

Yahoo! is one of the biggest purchasers on the internet today and has swallowed up a number of other popular websites, making the Yahoo! brand prominent across a range of services. Flickr and Upcoming are both examples of massively popular sites that now fall under the Yahoo! banner, combining login information and other personal details. Similar to other networks, such as Google sites and Microsoft Live, this makes it very convenient to move between sites without having to re-enter information or create even more passwords. The Yahoo! homepage itself quite busy, but offers a lot of information and allows for customisation. The pared-back dedicated search page is a lot cleaner and quicker, for those just wanting to search

Looking at their search function, Yahoo! offers a similar set of features as Google, including Shortcuts that allows the user to quickly find answers, facts and information, even recipes, right from the search site. The results page features sponsored links and advertising very similar to Google and also offers results to your query from news articles and similar searches. The image and video searches work as you would expect them to and the local search gives the opportunity to search for results from a certain area. The Yahoo! Search Assist helper appears when you begin to type in your criteria, offering to complete your search or select local versions of the site. This may appeal to some people and could be useful when figuring out what criteria to search for based on a couple of keywords.

The results from Yahoo! differ from Google’s due to the different algorithms and technology behind the scenes, but both are very effective. I’ll go into more detail about combining search engines soon. I’ve noticed that Yahoo! results tend to favour results that feature the criteria in the site or metadata text, in addition to Yahoo!-owned sites. This can be beneficial when searching for exact terms when compared against Google’s technology that values site that link to and from results in addition to the criteria itself.

Like every search site, Yahoo! will not be for everyone. For every user that likes the extra information and services on offer on the search page, there will be some who are turned off for that very reason. What is clear, though, is that Yahoo! offers a very capable search engine in addition to an attractive suite of sites offering a range of services, such as Mail, Groups, Messenger, Flickr and so on. I believe that the more of these services a user is using, the more valuable and integrated the search engine aspect becomes.

Equations and conversions are a good first example, just enter a simple sum, such as 10+5, into the search box and hit enter. Similarly, enter a plain text conversion question, like three cups in pints, and Google will calculate it instantly. The same works for currencies, try 10 US dollars in UK pounds.

This is great for maths-based questions, but the same also works for factual questions. Next time you have a question with a straight-forward factual answer, try putting it into Google and see if you get the answer right back. You could start with an easy one, such as the population of Australia, and quickly find out that it’s just over 20 million. Staying with countries, how about the GDP of Brazil? Simple, according to Google, via various other sources, it is around US$1.6 trillion. Moving away from countries now, we can find out that date of birth for Nelson Mandela is 18 July, 1918; that the height of Mt Everest is 29,000 feet; or that the stock price for GOOG is currently around 714.87. All this without leaving Google.

Now we can try business information. Try searching for Melbourne Central, Melbourne, Australia. You can see that Google has returned an address, map and phone numbers for the most likely results. For US searchers, there will be a lot more information that can be found by entering information that you already have. Give it a shot with other addresses or phone numbers. In addition to this kind of information, you can also get information on courier packages simply by entering their consignment number. Google will recognise the number and the company and let you know where your package is.

The last feature of Google that I’ll cover here is definitions. Just enter define: and then any word and Google will search a number of locations for definitions and return them for you. Give it a shot with define: dodecahedron. This is a quick and easy way to use Google as a dictionary and thesaurus, all from the single page and can be extremely useful for technical or less-common words you may come across.

In short, don’t be afraid of typing things into Google to see what comes back. Just ask a question and you could receive an answer with your very next click!

Quotation marks

Say you wanted to search for boysenberry juice. Just typing boysenberry juice into a search engine indicates that you are looking for pages that are relevant to the words ‘boysenberry’ and/or ‘juice’, so your search results may end up including items on different juices, or growing boysenberries. In fact, Google brings back 91,100 results for this query, which may be fine if we were looking for general information about berries or juices, but not in this situation.

Trying the search again, this time by putting the terms in quotes, “boysenberry juice”, narrows this number down to 2,630. That’s still a lot of results, but we are heading in the right direction. The quotes indicate that we are looking for pages relevant to the term ‘boysenberry juice’ as a single entity, not two separate terms. The results this time would include pages specifically mentioning ‘boysenberry juice’ or pages that may include those two words in sequence; basically anywhere the exact phrase ‘boysenberry juice’ appears.

Quotes are also a great way to search for a term or phrase that may be made up of other common terms. Song lyrics are a good example of this, as are famous quotations or other longer pieces of information. There are over two million hits for I don’t like raspberries, but only around two thousand for “I don’t like raspberries”.

Plus

Quotes are effective when searching for a string of information, but if the terms you are looking for aren’t necessarily in a set order, the plus sign may be a better way to reduce your search results. The plus sign in front of a search term indicates that the results must contain that word. A search for horses pineapples turns up roughly 1.5 million results that feature horses, pineapples and both horses and pineapples, while a search for +horses +pineapples returns only 166,000 results that deal with both horses and pineapples.

This concept can be added to any other search; for example, the search terms “I don’t like raspberries” +horses narrows down the two thousand results we found earlier about raspberries to just three entries.

Minus

Working in the opposite way to the plus sign, the minus sign lets you specify which terms you don’t want appearing in your results. This can be useful if what you are searching for has more than one meaning, such as the mobile device BlackBerry and the fruit. It also allows you to filter out many results that appear as you refine your search. Searching for berries, in this example, gives thirteen million results, but when we request only pages that do not contain the term ‘raspberries’ by searching for berries -raspberries, we can reduce this to just over two million results.

Refining search results

You will probably have noticed that the number of results that these example searches have returned are still very large; however, by using a combination of the above techniques and progressively refining your search terms, you will begin to reduce these numbers and also start bringing more relevant results to the top of the list. This refinement saves time wading through many results and helps when trying to find obscure or specific pieces of information.