How to use search engine

Search Engine? Many of us would know this term and rightly so as a place where one can search the www i.e. world-wide-web.

All of us would be using some search engine in a normal working day. From my experience I find it difficult to find a single day in office without going to the plain white screen of google. We are so used to the method of search that we never think about any possibilities of optimising the search results that we do. Today we discuss ways and means to improve our search results in google.

Search Toolbar
Why type google.com to start your search. Set google.com as home page. This would mean that whenever you click the Internet explorer (IE) it begins with google. To do this right click the IE icon and go to properties. In the general tab set the home page.
Why set google as home page also, it takes up a few more seconds to start and slows the speed. Head to toolbar.google.com to download the google toolbar. Once you have downloaded the toolbar whenever you start the Internet the toolbar would be present and you can just type the search term and see the results. The toolbar has other utilities also like blocking the pop-ups, etc.

Quotes
Use of “ ” quotes gives the most relevant results and the desired results appear as high up in the list as possible. Example, if you want to know who was ICC cricketer of the year in 2005 instead of just typing the same, try “ICC cricketer of the year” followed by “2005”. Check the results!!!

Excluding unwanted results
Use of – minus sign excludes certain words from your search. Example if you want to search the details of 8.3 processor, typing “8.3 processor” would probably give a lot of results that speak about other processors like 5.3, 6.3 and 7.3. Hence the search term should be “8.3 processor –5.3 –6.3 –7.3”.

Forcing some keywords
Whenever the search term is a bit long you will sometime find that there are pages which don’t contain one or more of your search terms at all. Here you would like to force a certain keyword or keyphrase to be included in the search, use the + plus sign to do the same. Example, typing in “favourite example hardware sata mouse” will bring up some results without one or more of those words. If you need the word “example” (which is a common word, so google might leave it out) type “favourite +example sata hardware mouse”

Personalised Search
To make the search results more and more relevant over time try using google search only after signing in, the link is at the top right corner. You need to use your gmail account username and password. Once u sign in and start your search google remembers what you searched for and where all have you clicked and thereby give you more personalised and accurate results. Some of us may not want to share this with google but some of us are not bothered if it improves the search quality. That’s left to individual choices… this tip is for the people who fall in later category.

Definitions
What about using google as a online dictionary. Do you want to know the meaning of a particular word say imagine, type define:imagine and see the results.
Searching within sites
Many sites have google search on their home page. However this forces us to go to this site for search. But this can be avoided by typing the name of the site in the search term. Example, you want to get details about AS 11 on our institute’s site then the search term “AS 11 site:www.icai.org” would work wonders.
Search on file types
If you are searching for a document on the web than you can also specify the file type to be used for the search. Hence if you are searching for a pdf document for derivative trading than try the search term “Derivative filetype:pdf”. U can also try for other file types like xls, doc, mp3, etc.

Search the URL (link)
Instead of searching for the content of a site if you are in search of a particular word in URL then try the inurl option. Hence a search for “inurl:cvoca” would search for all the urls having cvoca word in the same.

A combination of above tips can also be used to further filter the search results.