Advanced Search Techniques
It is quite easy to get discouraged when searching the Internet. Just about any search can result in hundreds, thousands, or even millions of "hits." For example, suppose you wanted to track down information concerning community college online science courses. You choose to use Google and use the following key words: community college online science courses.
A simple search will list EVERY site that has ANY of the keywords entered!!!
This lists approximately 132,000,000 sites. Obviously you can not possible view the millions of "hits", you do not wish to see courses that are from social sciences, fire sciences, etc., and you only wish to view community college information. Therefore, it is essential that one knows how to customize searches using the various search locations available on the Net.
Tips, Tools, & Tricks To Advanced Searches
The more specific you can be, the better. Don't worry about redundancy--synonyms can help narrow the field of your search. Leave out nonessential words like prepositions and articles (of, to, the, and so on)--most search engines ignore them anyway.
Add "Boolean Operators". That's just a fancy name for the words AND, OR, NEAR, AND NOT. Most search engines accept the symbols + and - for AND, and NOT, respectively. By entering these operators between each keyword, it is quite easy to instantly decrease the number of hits, thus achieving a much higher relevance.
Surround specific keywords with quotation marks. This requires the search engine to locate the EXACT PHRASE in order for it to be returned as a "hit."
Use wildcards such as * to include extra letters following the keyword letters entered.
Now if you redo the search with the following:
- Place quotation marks around "community college"
- Place a minus sign in front of keywords you’re not interested in such as
-social and -fire and -political
Adding quotes and using the "-" sign will eliminate almost 10 million hits! However, there are still more than a million hits to view - still too many. You will need to refine the search even more.
Try surrounding "online science courses" with quotes to see if you can find that exact phrase on a Web site.
In doing so, the search eliminated 4/5 of the hits above and the first hit on the list is quite relevant. You’re getting closer to a manageable number of hits but 3,490,000 is still too many.
Suppose you’re interested in "earth science" hits only. Unfortunately, entering the phrase "earth science online courses" yields nine hits that point to this Online Survival Guide so you should try searching with "earth science" & "online course". This yields an even smaller number of hits and most of the first ten links are relevant.
There is another way to narrow a search - search just the TITLES of Web documents!
Use the title: operator to search for keywords and key phrases in the titles of documents.
This brings back only 1,150 hits! Please keep in mind that there may be hits eliminated that are quite relevant but fail to have your keyword choices in the title of the document.
In case you were wondering:
Entering earth science course alone without the title operator yields 112 million hits!
Entering "earth science course" without the title operator yields 30,400 hits!
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