Get What You Want on the Web

The Internet is an incredibly tool that gives us a million libraries worth of information at our fingertips, but most people feel like finding what they want is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Search engines like Google and Yahoo are becoming more user friendly by the day, but there are still plenty of ways to make your life easier online. Here are some tips for cruising the information superhighway.

1. Know how to narrow it down - You don't want to use general terms or common words. Words like "the" and "and" are practically useless in an Internet search. Find the words that will separate your quarry from the pack. If you are looking for 80's musician Howard Jones, you will have to be more specific than simply entering his name. Search for "Howard Jones singer" or "Howard Jones musician".

2. Spell it right - Even though search engines nowadays will account for most common spelling errors, you can still run into problems with more specific terms.

3. Tell it what you DON'T want - An easy tip. Putting a dash (-) in front of a word tells the search engine to eliminate any results that include that word. This also works when searching ebay! However, be careful. If you choose to omit too many words or a word that is common, you may lose so good results.

4. Quote me on that - A lot of times, you will be searching for something like a specific name or title and you will get a lot of results you don't want. I find this particularly useful with quotes or song lyrics where you don't know the source. For example, a search of the phrase "put your sweet lips a little closer" reveals that the passage comes from the country classic, "Put Your Sweet Lips a Little Closer To The Phone" by Jim Reeves.

5. Skip to the good stuff - When searching some sites (Yahoo, I'm looking at you), your results will begin with some highlighted entries at the top of the page. These are sponsors that pay the host to put their site in a prominent spot. You will want to scroll down to the regular listings to see what you are really looking for.

6. Learn to Read Results - Search engines offer a brief summary of the page text along with the title. Often times, you can simply scan these summaries of the search results without having to click on a dozen pages.

Finding what you want online can be worse than shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, but with these tips, you will find yourself mining through bushels of data with a few strokes of the keyboard.