I was sitting in a friend’s house as he was searching for some information that he wanted. As he was searching he was cursing and complaining that why is that the results that were coming up had nothing to do with what he was searching for. He tried several times to search and just became more frustrated.

I told him let me search it for you and I will get you good results. I asked him a few question of what he was searching for, then I typed a few words into the search engine and when the results came up I asked him if these were the type of sites he is looking for and he said yes. He then told me that the results I got would save him tons of time.

Main Search Points
There are several main points to know in order to learn how to search properly. A major point to learn is to think how the computer thinks. Search engine usually do not take into consideration commonly used words such as the, and, an, is, of and many other words, so it is best not to use these words.

The order of how you enter words can greatly change the results of what you are searching for. For instance if you are searching for a green frog, you can type either “green frog” or “frog green” and either combination of words can give different results.

If you use quotes around words, then a phrase will be searched instead of individual words. This means that the search will only bring up result that has the phrase’s two or more words are used together in the order that they are in the phrase. So if you type in “white furry cats” then the search engines will only search for that phrase. When I typed into the Google Search Box “white furry cat” only 365 page options came up. When I type in white furry cat then 437,000 page options cam up. In this way you can see with just a simple use of quote can higher reduce your option of chooses.

You can take out option for words from a search by place a minus (-) sign in front of it. For instant you can type in “stripped cat,” but you are not looking for a tiger you would put in the search box (“stripped cat” -tiger).

The object of a good search is to get the most relevance results at the top of the first page. Often the matching pages contend the page title and a description from the page, often using the first few sentences on the first page or using the description entered for each page.

Usually results are listed by either ten or twenty results per page that best suit the search criteria.

Most search engines have facilities for an advance search and Google has one of the best. With Google they give you the options to make a search with “all the food included” in the search. You can search for an exact phrase which is the same as a search surrounded by quotes. You can make a search that contains “at least one of the words.” You can also choice a search result “without certain words”, which is the same of placing a minus sign in front of a word.

They also give you the option that the result just return pages that have been updated within a certain period, say within the last three month or last six months. Also you can get result they are only in a certain language. You can also restrict the return of result to certain types of files such as PDF or .doc. You can also search for result in the body text of a page, the title of a page, or the URL of the page.

A main point is that a good search result should come up on the first page of the results. Look quickly and see if the general results are what you want and if they are not, maybe change the order of the words you search for or add a word or two. Then maybe put some of the words in quotes. I like to move quickly as I always know I can come back and search with the words I used previously.

Also consider using some other programs for searches beside Google or your favorite search engines. Besides Google I would often use Yahoo!, Altavista and MSN and they often would have much different result and in some cases much better results.

Problems with Search Engine Results
Regrettably no search results can be absolutely perfect because the logic that search engine function are often very different. In an ideal world the result of a search would be totally judged by what the content that is found on web pages. Regrettably because of immoral web page maker other considerations have to be taken into considerations. Because some web page makers would put invisible text on their site with many popular key type again and again by only the search engine would see them. Now many of the search engine penalize site that use these sites.

Now Google when judging site highly takes into consideration in the result they give the amount of quality link a site has coming to it. The problem with this system is that sites that are on a specific subject with hundreds of pages on that subject but are new or do not have many link may be many sites down from a site that doesn’t have much on a subject but has a high amount of good quality links coming to it may rank number one in the search result when they just have a few pages on the subjects.

The point is that just because a website comes up high on a search engine for a particular subject does not mean that a website found on the next result page does not have much better contents on the subject you are looking for.