patndoris TechnoGeek

You can find most any information you want by using search engines on the internet. My favorite is Google. Knowing how to do an effective search will increase the likelihood you'll find relevant results, and hopefully the information you're searching for.

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First, pick the most important words in the search you want to do - these are known as "keywords". For example, if you want to search on "How to do an effective Google search" you might choose the keywords "effective Google search". When typing in the terms capitalization is not important and you don't need to put commas between items. Google will automatically understand you want an implied "and" between the words. Thus in the above example it will look for "effective (and) Google (and) search". It is important to remember that the order of the words makes a difference in the search results. The first word is the most important, the second, and so on. You can continue to narrow down the search by including more search terms.

Most people know the basics of a search, but there are some additional search tips that can help you. Remember that words like "of, the, and" are generally not considered even if you type them in as keywords. They don't add much to searches so Google will just generally ignore them. If Google can't find good results it may consider them, but they are considered optional and not required. Unless of course you are searching for an exact phrase, and you put the words in quotation marks. Thus for our search you might choose to type the following: effective "Google search". It helps narrow down your results to those that are most pertinent for you. You can also exclude certain terms by placing a "-" in front of the word. So if we don't want documents containing the word "results" we might type: "Google search" effective -results.

You can read more on good Googling on the Web Search Help Center. Once you get proficient at searching you might also find you will sometimes use the Advanced Search. It offers a lot of additional fields to assist in narrowing down your search results. I find the date the page was last updated is helpful to narrow results to those that are recent. To read more about this, check out the Advanced Searching article on Google.

Most searches can be done without using the Advanced Options, but they may come in handy. It's to your advantage to practice and learn the basic rules of a good search so you can easily find what you are looking for. Remember - Google is your friend. With a little practice you can learn to find darn near anything. A small reminder, you may still need to scroll through pages of results to find the most relevant one(s) to you. If you find you get millions of results for a search, try using additional keywords or quotation marks or the "-" sign to help narrow it down to a more manageable number.