How to Use Google to Get Better Search Results

Internet has been expanding like anything. There are tons and tons of websites coming up everyday. And as such, they face a very bright chance of getting lost in this ever growing maze. Thank god, someone invented Google. Google helps getting even newbies the respect and recognition they deserve.

For most of the users, internet experience is limited to mails, chatting, and searching for the stuff. And it is the last category which we are going to talk about. When anyone starts searching net for stuff, they rely on the capabilities of popular search engines, the category being dominated by Google. In fact, Google has become so synonymous with internet search capabilities that search on internet is sometimes also referred to as Googling. The most lucrative features are its cleanest and easiest interface. You open Google, and get a big text box in which you can enter your search terms, hit Google, and woosh...you get all the results from around the globe that match your search criteria.

This is where the problem starts. As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, there are millions of websites out there, and tons being added everyday. So, your search might lead you to so many results that you might find yourself to be more lost in this maze than ever. Searching for right internet results is an art. Aim here is to perform search in a better way so that:

1. The search results are more relevant to your search criteria
2. Irrelevant search results are filtered out.

You might think that both of the above are two sides of the same coin, and achieving one might automatically lead to achieving second. Actually, this is not the case. I will explain that in a few seconds.

Lets see how we can search in a better way on Google, so as to achieve both of the above objectives:

1. Include as many search terms as possible: This is the easiest and most effective way of getting closer to your desired search results. Most of the time, people are looking for some particular item, but they tend to give generic term for their search. For example, in case someone is looking for a particular semiconductor, then they should give specific terms related to their semiconductor instead of giving generic terms such as "Electronics". This will ensure that they get the search results that are relevant to search results they are looking for. Also, try to include as much information as possible. For the example above, include all the information that you know about semiconductor, such as semiconductor number etc. Also, do not include the words such as 'and', 'the' etc. in your search terms as these terms are normally not included by Google while doing search.
2. Club related words together: Whenever you give search terms, Google finds the web pages that contain all of those words, in any order. The last part of my sentence is most important here. In case you are looking for search results related to Bryan Adams, then club Bryan Adams together. To do this, just enclose the terms/phrase in double quotes. For e.g., to search for Bryan Adams, write search terms as "Bryan Adams". This will ensure that only those results appear in which Bryan Adams come together.

Above two techniques ensure that the first objective (finding relevant search results) is met. Lets see how to achieve the second objective.

1. Filter out unwanted results: Lets say you have a friend named Bryan Adams, and you are searching for results related to him. As might be obvious, when you will search for Bryan Adams, Google will give results that primarily relate to the singer Bryan Adams, and there is a high chance that the search results related to your friend get lost. So, you want to find all the results that do not relate to songs. This is easy. If you want to avoid a result that contains a particular term, you can do that by including a hyphen before that word. So, if you want to search for Bryan Adams, but want to avoid those pages that contain terms mp3 or songs, you would enter search terms as: "bryan adams" -mp3 -songs

The above techniques are really simple, but very highly effective. Using these would help you in quickly getting close to your desired results.

Happy Googling.