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Find Your Needle in the Haystack

By Amy Dent Beebe

Tired of wading through thousands of results that don't seem to have anything to do with what you were searching for? Use these tips to increase your searching productivity! These commands should work on all the major search engines, a few exceptions are noted.

Use more than one search engine
No one search engine indexes all websites and pages. So if your first search doesn't produce the results you want, try searching with at least one other search engine - the results may often vary widely due to each search engine's methods of compiling. Many search engines now offer links other search engines at the bottom of your search results.

Here are the current top search engines by their percentage of overall usage, according to SearchEngineWatch.com and MediaMetrix, August 2003:

Google: 32%, Yahoo: 28%, AOL Search: 19%, MSN: 17%, Ask: 2%, Others: 2%, Lycos: 0.4%, Overture: 1%, AltaVista: 1%, , CNET: 0.2; AllTheWeb: 0.2%

Read the About page
Many search engines have a link that leads to detailed information about how the search engine compiles and searches through information, and how to get the best results from it. Reading this page can save you a lot of time and headaches. Also, visit search engine home page links with names like How To, Search Help, and Advanced Search for searching tips.

Don't be afraid to be specific.
The more information you give a search engine, the easier it will be to find what you want. If you want information on a recall pertaining to your car, search for "1995 Mercury Mystique LS recall." Often, typing in your exact question will actually produce great results - for instance "Is the ignition in my 1995 Mercury Mystique LS being recalled?"

Add it up
When you want to find pages that have all the terms you enter, rather than any one of them, use the + symbol. This means that the words with + before them MUST appear in the title or body of a web page.

For example, imagine you want to find pages that have references Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Typing in just Star Wars: The Phantom Menace will likely get you results with everything from the Regan Administration to the Phantom of the Opera.

Typing in:

+star +wars +phantom +menace

would narrow down your search to pages that specifically refer to only the Star Wars movie in question, weeding out pages that only refer to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi.

Here's another example using recent events:

+china +crash

Narrow it down further by adding on:

+china +crash +spy +plane

Now if you want to know how this incident may impact trade relations, find only pages that include that information:

+china +crash +spy +plane +trade

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