 | By Mark Joseph Edwards When search engines provide too much info, you need a way to find the right needle in a gigantic Internet haystack. This week, I give you three powerful tips to help you find exactly what you’re looking for while eliminating useless search results. |
Advanced tricks for Google and Yahoo
Nearly everyone has heard of Google and Yahoo. But not everyone knows the most powerful ways to refine searches. By learning some extended search syntax, you can create far more powerful searches to help you quickly find exactly what you’re looking for.
Both Google and Yahoo provide easy ways to access the extended syntax through an “advanced” Web search form. However, entering specific tags in your search query manually is often much faster than using the advanced search forms. Let’s take a look at several tips you can use to get far better search results.
The first tip is knowing how to encapsulate keywords and how to include and exclude keywords:
1. If you’re trying to find pages with an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. If you want only pages that include certain “noise words” (such as how, where, and I, which search engines ordinarily omit from queries), prefix those words with a plus sign. Similarly, to exclude pages with certain words, prefix those words with a minus sign.
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