One of the best things about the web is undeniably search engines. Be it a commercial website or a personal blog, most websites are nowadays search engine optimized. Searching is a lot easier if you are friendly with your search engine, which is not the case with many people. By inspecting search queries saved by autocomplete features of web browsers in public computers at school and public libraries, I’ve noticed that many people do not make optimum use of search engines. So the objective of this post is to outline the do’s and don’ts for a good search.

Tips

• Simple is good. Describe what we need with as few terms as possible, like we’d expect them on the page. For example, instead of saying “my head hurts”, say “headache”—that’s how we’d expect it to be written as on a medical page.
• Words matter, character casing doesn’t. Typically, searches are normally case insensitive and all terms are included in the search. So, a search for “Apple iPhone” is the same as “apple iphone”. However, there are certain commonly used words such as ‘the’, ‘a’, and ‘for’ – also known as stop words-which are usually truncated. This exception can also be overruled in select cases.
• Punctuation is ignored. Generally, special characters like @#$%^&*()=+[] are usually ignored. In cases where punctuation has particular meanings in terms, such special characters are not ignored. For example, “C++” and “C#” which are both names of programming languages. The dollar sign ($) and other currency signs are also not ignored since it is used to indicate prices. The underscore (_) is also not ignored when it is used to join two words. For example “ quick_sort “ which is the name of a computer language function.

Advanced Search

• Phrase search (“”)
  Surrounding a set of words by double quotes tells Google to look exactly for the specified words, in the exact order without any change. However using such strict query, you may miss out good results accidentally. For example, a search for “Alexander Bell” will miss pages that refer to “Alexander Graham Bell”.
• Site-specific search ( site: )
  You can restrict your search to a specific site. For example, let’s say you are looking for a Wikipedia article on the Telephone. “Telephone site:wikipedia.org”  will return results from Wikipedia only. Simple queries like “telephone wikipedia” will also be as good, but may include results to other sites that mention Wikipedia. You can also do a domain-wise search. For example “hotels site:.mu” will return results from all .mu domain only (Mauritius).
• File Type ( filetype: )
  You can restrict your search to specific file types. For example, “ question paper filetype:pdf ” will return PDF documents only.
• Related Search
  You can find pages which have similar content by typing related: followed by the website address. Example “ related:en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein ” will show contents having similar content to Wikipedia article on Albert Einstein.
• Exclude Terms ( – )
  You can choose to exclude terms by prefixing the unwanted terms. For example, “virus –software” will exclude results referencing to software. You may also exclude a domain completely from your results. For example, “apple –site:apple.com” to search for apple fruit instead of computer software giant Apple, Inc.. However, when the minus is used as a hyphen. For example, “anti-virus –software” will exclude software references but will include the term virus.
• Fill in the blanks ( * )
  You can have Google “guess” the missing word. For example, “ google * ” will list all Google products.
• Exact Search ( + )
  You can instruct Google to strictly emphasize some words in a phrase. For example “ best email service +gmail ” will hit topics pertaining to Email services referencing Gmail. It behaves the same way like double quotes ( “” ).
• The OR operator ( | )
  You can choose to allow either of several words. For example, “Olympics 2008 OR 2009” will show up results for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Note: You must type OR in all caps or u may use the pipe symbol ( | ) as a substitute.

More Search Tools

• Currency Converter
  You can directly use Google search as a currency converter. Example: “ 1 USD to MUR ” will convert 1 US Dollar to Mauritian Rupees.
• Unit Conversion
  You can convert between different units using Google Search. Example: “38C in F” will return 38 Degrees Celsius equivalent in Fahrenheit.
• Cached Pages ( cache: )
  Looking for an earlier version of a web page or can’t access the website? You can use the “ cache: ” keyword to find a copy of the web page. For example, “cache:www.google.com”
• Calculator
  You can also use Google search as a calculator. Example, “ 5 * 65 ” will compute the value of the expression.