If you need to find a site written in a specific language, use Alta Vista which allows you to choose a language before you search, with a drop down menu. Babel Fish will allow you to translate the page when you have one in a language you don’t understand.

Sometimes pictures are the only way to be sure that you are looking for the right thing. Above the google search box is a link called images. Perhaps you have just seen a baboon but you don’t what it is called. Using the images box you could key in monkey AND blue face OR red bottom. When you have found a picture you can go to the sites that display it and get its common name and often its scientific name as well, then you can use its name to search for more information.

Lastly don’t forget right click. If you have a page of results that you like from a search you don’t have to keep going back and forward. Just right click on a link and choose open in a new window. To open and close a single site this way takes less time than reloading a search result page each time.

Using symbols to narrow a search.

Use a + sign before a word to tell your search engine that you want the word to be in all results the search engine finds. For example if you want to search for information about being pregnant with twins you might enter pregnancy twins in the box. This will return all the results for each of these keywords. Alternately pregnancy + twins will only return those pregnancy results that have the word twins on the same page, narrowing your search to more relevant results.

Use the - sign before a word to exclude meanings that you are not interested in. For example King James - bible will not return pages with this key phrase . Reduce your results by excluding words that are often grouped but have no relevance to your search topic which in this case is Kings by the name of James.

Use an * as a wild card for spellings. Place the asterix at the end of your word and your search will include variants of the word. If you enter flower*, pages will be shown that include the words flower, flowers, flowering, flowered - that is any extensions or alternate endings of your keyword.

To find an exact phrase put it in double quotation marks. “seven wonders of the world” will bring fewer and more relevant results than seven wonders of the world which will return pages that may only have the single words seven, wonders and world on them.

Different search engines have different ways of listing results. Google prioritises results according to how close together the search terms appear so it performs well with these phrases. Quotes still help with phrases where common word combinations overlap, by defining order. “run my blog” will return different results to “blog my run” but blog run will return both. Sorry I couldn’t think of a better example, maybe someone could suggest one, but you get my point.

Ian asked me to do a few articles on search skills for his clients. He has an online trivia game called Complete Trivia where people often need to find quite obscure pieces of information from only a few clues. It seemed like as good a place to start as any, so I will. Actually just a few additions to a search can make a big difference in the results you get.

Libraries and Universities often use something called Boolean Search and these ways can also be used successfully with most search engines. Using the words AND OR NOT and NEAR between keywords can greatly change your results. Always use them in upper case and generally speaking don’t otherwise use upper case. Lower case will find upper or lower case words. Upper case or capitals should really only be used for names.

AND will return results for pages with both words on them only. This narrows a search.

OR will  return results for pages with either word on all pages. This widens a search.

NOT will return results for pages including the first word but not those that include the second. A great example of use for this might be if you were looking for pages on pythons. If you type in python NOT monty you will not be clogged up with pages about the comedy skit.

NEAR allows you to specify that two terms must appear close to each other on the page. Generally this means the two words will be within five words of each other.  For example the word sauce making with herbs will still be shown to you in results returned by a search for sauce NEAR herbs.

You can extend this technique with the use of brackets. For example sauce NEAR (sage AND basil AND herbs) will return any page with sauce on it that also contains either basil, sage or herbs near to it or you can widen the search by putting AND instead of NEAR.