Dexterity Unlimited – Articles » Blog Archive » Better Searching With Google

For several years I have been of the opinion that the majority of people using Google’s search engine do not really know how to use but a small fraction of its potential when looking for something online. Wading through server logs and Google Analytics reports has only reinforced this opinion.

I suppose that this article is not the type to reach the general searching public, but I find that even people who have been online for years, and who work in Internet related fields are unaware of some of the basic functions they can use to get better results from their searches.

I would like to give people a couple basic tips that should help them to narrow their searches in order to find web pages that contain what they are really trying to find.

Use Quotes

When most people search using Google, they type a few words into the search box, and press the button, hoping for the best. While this can yield results containing useful pages, often these results contain countless pages that have nothing to do with what you really want to find.

Consider looking for “search engine optimization”. If you put that text into the search box by themselves and click the search button, you are asking Google to give you a list of any pages that contain all of these three words. Somewhere in that list might be a page discussing a search for ways to optimize the output thrust of a jet engine. Is that what you had in mind? It does contain all of the search terms.

Placing quotation marks (”) around words that constitute phrases you are looking for will greatly improve the relevancy of the results returned by Google. In some cases, this is a necessity when searching for some words, particularly names, that contain spaces or hyphens. While doing genealogy research online, I must use quotes around the family name Te Kulve in order to get desired results.

Plus and Minus Signs

Using a plus (+) or minus (-) sign immediately before a word or a quoted phrase in your search query will require Google to be certain that pages containing that word or phrase are included or excluded from the results.

Have you ever initiated a search only to find that hundreds of pages containing your search terms, but obviously unrelated to what you want to find, are included in the results? One way to get those pages out of the results is to find another term that most of them have in common that you can exclude with a refined query.

If hundreds of pages about baseball show up in your search for a quantum mechanics reference, simply add -baseball to your search query. The same technique works with other advanced search options. Are you getting hundreds of unrelated results from a particular site? Use -site:www.domain.com to exclude pages within that site from the search results.

Do some of the results in the list not contain one of the words you are searching for? Use the plus sign in front of that word to require that the results all contain that word. I frequently use a plus sign in front of each word or phrase in my search queries. Yes, it’s overkill, and most times not necessary, but old habits die hard.

What does this mean for SEO?

For those of us involved in Search Engine Optimization, it can only benefit us if people learn how to search more effectively. It’s usually easier to get nearer the top of a list of fifteen thousand results than a list of seventeen million results.

It also means that we need to keep our eyes open to what people are searching for when they come to our sites via Google (or any other search engine). Look at your log file reports, or Google Analytics reports. See how people find you. Are their searches really looking for something different, or are you hitting the right targets?

Help your friends and neighbors find what they’re looking for. Give them a couple basic tips about searching, and I’m sure they’ll see better results. They’ll thank you for it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.