How to Use Search Engines Correctly

You probably have used Google and Yahoo hundreds of times to look up information on the internet. Usually you type in a few key words and hope what comes up in the search results is what you are looking for.

Below are a few simple tricks that will help you tap into the power of these search engines and find the results you are looking for.

Use Double Quotes. Some search engines like Google and Yahoo process each word individually. If you are looking for a title of a book, a song lyric or a name of person, place double quotes around the name. With double quotes the search engine will look for the exact phrase in the order that you typed it.

Be Specific. If you use too little words or words that have double meanings you can get a lot of search results that will be meaningless to you.

For example if you are looking for a clipart of a white rose you would want to type "white rose clipart". This will narrow your search results down to just that. If for some reason you get too many results that also include white wine, you can type in the following: "white rose clipart"-wine. The minus sign will omit the word wine from your search results.

Specialized Search Engines. There are also hundreds of specialized search engines that may help your search results on specific topics. A few which I have used are the following:

Wink This is great for finding people on social networks like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and many others.

Zillow.com This is a real estate search engine that helps people find homes. Also has housing information and maps.

Search-22 is a directory of search engines. You can also find reference and educational material.

Dogpile is a Meta tag search engine. This means the search results are gathered from search engines and websites.

So start experimenting the next time you are looking up something and see for yourself what kind of search results you come up with.