Tips for Searching Effectively with Google

Tricks for Great Google Searches

Screen Capture by Marziah Karch

Ok, you're trying to plan your next vacation, and you'd like to go someplace where you can ride horses. You type "horses" into Google, and you instantly get back results. 1-10 of about 131,000,000! That's far too many. Your vacation will be over before you finish searching the web.

Post # 2

Add Search Terms

Screen Capture by Marziah Karch

Screen Capture by Marziah Karch

The first step is to narrow your search by adding search words. How about horse riding? That narrows the search to 35,500,000. Google's results now show all the pages that contain the search terms "horse" and "riding." That means your results will include both pages with horse riding and riding horse. There's no need to type in the word "and."

Stemming Words

Google automatically searches for variations of the words you use, so when you search for horse riding, you're also searching for ride and horses.

Post # 3

nctuation

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Let's narrow it down to only pages with the exact phrase "horse riding" in them. Do this by putting quotes around the phrase you want to search for. This narrows it down to 10,600,000. Let's add vacation to the search terms. Since we don't need the exact phrase "horse riding vacation," type it as "horse riding" vacation. This is very promising. We're down to 1,420,000 and the first page of results all seem to be about horse riding vacations.

Similarly, if you had results you wanted to exclude, you could use a minus sign, so horse -breeding would yield results of horse without the word breeding on the page. Make sure you put a space before the minus sign and no space between the minus sign and the word or phrase you wish to exclude.

Post # 4

Think of Other Ways to Say It

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Isn't another word for a place that hosts horse riding vacations a "guest ranch?" (4,980,000) How about "dude ranch." (4,240,000)

Post # 5

Either OR

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Either of those terms could be used, so how about searching for both of them at once? To find results that include either one term or another, type uppercase OR between the two terms you want to find, so type in '"dude ranch" OR "guest ranch."' That's still a lot of results, but we'll narrow it down further and find one within driving distance.

Post #6

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Let's find a dude ranch in Misouri. Drat, that word is misspelled. Google helpfully searches for the word (477 other people can't spell Missouri, either.) But at the top of the results area, it also asks 'Did you mean: "dude ranch" OR "guest ranch" Missouri"' Click on the link, and it will search again, this time with the correct spelling.

Post #7

Look at the Grouping

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Google indents pages that are on the same website as the first result. This gives you a visual clue that you're looking at the same website.

Post #8

Save Some Cache

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If you're looking for a specific piece of information, sometimes it can get buried in a long web page. Click on the Cached link, and Google will show you the snapshot of the webpage that is stored on their server with your keywords highlighted. This can help you scan a web page quickly to determine if it's what you need.

We're down to 247,000 results. This is more manageable, and the top results are mostly what we're looking for. Not every result is a business, and not every result is in Missouri, but the summaries below the link give us a good clue about which websites we should examine further.

Post #9

Other Types of Searches

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Google can help with all sorts of advanced searches. Be sure to check the links at the top of the Google page to see if there's a search that might be more helpful or press the more button for more options.

In this case, rather than searching on Google's main search engine, it might be more helpful to search for a dude ranch in Missouri while looking at a map. To do this, click on the Maps link at the top of the screen.