Searching Smarter

I don’t know about you, but I conduct at least one Google search a day. It seems like there is always something I want to learn more about or need to find information about. I’ve learned that there are a few techniques that you can do in any simple search to improve your search results and cut down on the time you spend looking through information that is irrelevant to your search quest. Try these tricks the next time you search for anything online.

If you want to skip reading any further, you can watch a helpful little video that one of my peers at school put together for an assignment. She does a wonderful job of explaining and depicting everything I’m about to talk about. You can check out the video here: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~kreiber/karen.wmv .

Use quotes. By putting your search terms in quotation marks you are letting the search engine know that you want to find only results in which each of your terms appears in that exact order. This can be particularly helpful when looking for terms such as “French Restoration,” “human rights,” or “affirmative action.” Each of these terms, if placed on their own would result in a large number of useless results, but when placed in quotation marks greatly limits the options to those most relevant.

Use “Boolean Operators.” Boolean Operators are the following three words: and, or, not. When used properly, these can go a long ways towards improving your search capabilities. And can be used to limit a search, or can expand a search, and “not” can serve to limit a search. By placing these operators between your search terms (for example: endangered AND birds) you can help improve your search. Also, if you notice, many more formal, advanced search engines, such as the ones you might find at a library catalog already provide you with Boolean Operators to select from.

Use “site:” By attaching the word “site:” at the end of any search query and then including a domain extension, such as .com, .org, .gov, or .edu, you can limit your search and increase the reliability of the results. For example, if I was researching the French Revolution, but only wanted information from a school website I would type the following into my search bar: “French Revolution” site: .edu. This would give me results that only came from sites designated as “educational” and would limit my search to results which only had French and Revolution right next to each other.

Use a minus sign. Did you know that after any search query you can include a minus sign plus another term? This means that you want to exclude that secondary term from your search. I did this just the other day when I was looking for an image of the Australian bush country. I conducted my search in Google Images and originally searched the terms: Australian bush. I found that most of the results included George Bush, not at all what I wanted. So, I changed my search to read: Australian Bush –George. This narrowed my search, but then I found that most of the images were of the recent fires that crossed the Australian outback. I redefined my search to read: Australian Bush –George –fire. This gave me good results and I was able to quickly find the image I wanted.

Don’t ask questions. I know that “Ask Jeeves” has carved out a corner of the market by promoting this idea, but really, it is one of the worst ways to search on the internet. While the computer may be smart, you are smarter. Think about the question you are asking, extract the most important information and create a useful search question. Eliminate all insignificant words from your question (like, it, to, the) and focus on the nouns. Transitioning from “What impact does the government have on global warming?” to “Global Warming” government impact site: .gov will limit your search results from about 5 million to 500,000, not to mention increase the validity of your results. Despite the drastic difference it makes, you’d be surprised how many students just blindly type in their search question, rather than think about the actual query they are creating.

Hopefully, as you put these simple search techniques to use you can not only improve your own internet research capabilities, but pass on some good hints to your children.