search
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 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…
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!
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…
