Advanced Tips For Searching The Internet

Harley Dixon
July 22, 2020 0 Comment

The internet is brought to most people in the world thanks to the power of search engines. These are specialised websites and webservers that act as gateways for the user to access further sites and information on the internet.

They work as an online index of the world’s content, with such search engines as Google and Bing being the most popular. But despite how long we’ve had access to these different engines, there are still many people out there that battle with finding the results that they want. This is usually due to a lack of knowledge of how best to search the internet for a specific topic, but luckily there are a number of ways of making this process a lot simpler and efficient.

Specified Terms

The search engines of today are really good at predicting what a user is searching for, but it doesn’t take much to leave the engine confused and producing the wrong results, which can often be because of unspecific search terms.

The more broad a term, the more results that the engine will bring back, which can quickly become overwhelming and counterproductive. Using specific terms that directly relate to the subject being searched for will instantly cut down on the results and make it much easier to parse through the data being offered. It can also help locate a specific site or piece of information that would otherwise be impossible to find without the use of more specific searching.

Exact Phrasing

The previously mentioned entry can be expanded further by using precise and exact phrases when doing a search. This can be flagged in the search by making use of quotation marks that will go around the term that the user wants to find exact matches for.

This is a good way of finding people or specific items online that would be easily missed by using a more generic search, such as entertainment options for all. Keep in mind that using these exact phrases might make it difficult to perform a more generalised search, so it’s a good idea to swap between the two when trying to do a more in-depth search.

Stops Words And Punctuation

Not all words and letters are included by the engine when doing a search, and these are known as stop words, which can include terms like ‘a’ or ‘the’.  These words are entirely skipped by the engine, and including them is simply a waste of time.

Similarly, punctuation is also typically ignored by the engine, although there are a few exceptions to this. For instance, adding a “the” to the beginning of a phrase can dramatically alter the search results, but this is only because the stop word was used at the beginning rather than in the middle somewhere.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete is a powerful tool that’s offered by most search engines for as long as the searching is not done in incognito mode. The user is able to use autocomplete to finish all manner of phrases, and it can make searching online much more efficient and much faster overall.