Often when people ask me something, I want to reply “Ask Google”, as a lot of the questions and problems people have could be solved quickly by searching for 30 seconds on Google. Mostly people do not ask because they will not bother to search on Google, they either have not thought about the possibility that Google could help or they tried but could not find the answer to the problem. In this article I will try to explain my way of searching, as I rarely have a problem finding what I am after and use Google all the time for my own questions. Although the title is “How To Search On Google”, most of my tips will work on any major search engine but Google just happens to be the one I use.
When you have a question or problem the first thing you should ask yourself is : “how common is it to ask this question?”. If you think that even a tiny tiny percentage of the world’s population could have asked the same you can probably find it on Google. Only if your question is highly specific to your situation you should start looking for other sources of information and even then it does not hurt to try anyway.
The first thing to try will often be to just type your question like you would ask it to another person. Say if you want to take some great pictures with your new digital camera and therefore you want to know about photography, just write how to learn photography.
Sometimes when asking such a question the results are sort of on target but what you are after is not found on the first page. Then it often helps to use quotes around the parts of the question that belong together : “how to” learn photography. This tells the search engine that these words must be found exactly in the order you specified within the quotes.
In this example the search engine might find a lot of pages about how to do things related to your query but you are still not satisfied with the ratio of interesting pages to uninteresting pages. Then you can adjust the search in order to tell the search engine that the word “photography” must be found on the pages you are willing to consider, if that word is not found on the page, you are just not interested. The way to do this is to adjust with the “+”-sign : “how to” learn +photography.
If that still does not do it, it normally is due to your results getting “spammed” by pages that want to sell you something. So in order to weed those out you want to tell the search engine what terms you do not want to see in the results. The “-”-sign is used for that and for the online marketers terms like “price” and “discount” will often work to get rid of them : “how to” learn +photography -price -discount.
Now you should hopefully get the information you were after and even though it seems like a lot of steps when I describe each adjustment in detail, in practice you will quickly learn to recognize from the results you are getting what kind of change you should make to your query. In some rare cases, even when trying each of these adjustments, you do not find what you are looking for. In that case you should look at the result returned by the search engine from your best efforts at a query – if the results are all about the same subject, but just not the subject you want to know about, there is still hope and you should probably just try to use some other terms that describes your question from another perspective. If instead the result seems to be about all sorts of different subjects and none of them are quite right and it seems like the search engine is really trying hard to give you results at all you might have found a question where the answer is not easily found.
If you are using Google and search a lot a good tip is to install the Google toolbar. It installs an extra toolbar in your Internet explorer with a search field so you can search directly on Google without going to the Google site first. But the best thing about it is that when you search the terms in your query becomes buttons on the toolbar, which you can press to search for the term within the page you are viewing. This is extremely helpful when you need some details in a big page containing a lot of text and can help you to quickly assess whether the page actually contained the answer you were looking for or not.
Another quick tip is that Google actually can do more than just search for pages; another feature I use a lot is unit conversion. If you need to know how many litres 4.2 ounces is, just type in 4.2 ounces in litre and Google will return the correct amount. And this works for distance(3.5 yards in centimetres), area(1000 square feet in square meter) and weight(2 stone in pounds) conversions as well.
There are even more things you can do but these are the basic tips I have for you and the features I use all the time. I hope this will help you to find what you are looking for.
