People are using really four main internet search engines. And we will just cover those in this short guide. These internet search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. The main reason for using an internet search engine is to allow one to drill down and filter the massive amount of information on the World Wide Web and find exactly what he or she is looking for. However there are subtle differences in using the different internet search engines. The serious searcher will tap the strengths of each of them so as to have somewhat of an advanced search suite. Let’s briefly guide you through some of the tips of using the internet search engines:
How does one get started with internet search engines? All the internet search engines have a field where you type in the keywords of what you want to search for. Keywords are the words you believe are most likely to appear in the content of a web site you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for widgets, you type in the word “widget.” No matter which search engine you are using, there will likely be thousands of websites returned in the search results with the word widget. To narrow that down, you would begin adding more keywords. For instance, you might enter “green widgets.” For each additional keyword you add, the search is narrowed down further.
How does Boolean logic work when using each of the internet search engines? Boolean logic is basically the use of the words AND, OR, and NOT between the keywords. Using an internet search engine oftentimes requires creative implementation of Boolean logic for the more advanced searches. Of course when you use AND, both keywords must be found. When you use OR, one or the other keyword must be found. And, when you use NOT, the keyword on the right must not be included. Google does not have an implementation for the NOT operator however you can get the same effect when using this internet search engine by preceding the keyword with a minus sign and no space. An example would be “widgets –green.” This would indicate to search for widgets but no text should contain the word “green.”
What are some of the functions people are using in each of the internet search engines? The list of various in-line functions that can be used among the various search engines is too long for purposes of this article but let’s look at how a few of them work. For example, if you want look for specific text but limit it to one website, you would use the “site:” inline function in the search query window: site:www. . This function works on all the major search engines with the exception of (Live.com) Bing.com where it was turned off indefinitely because of abuses by data mining users.
Here are some more functions to enhance searches used by the other internet search engines:
intitle: to search for a keyword in the page title
inurl: search for a keyword in the page URL
inanchor:, allinanchor: search for keyword text in a link’s anchor text (Google only)
filetype: search only for pages of certain filetypes such as pdf or doc (all except for Yahoo; in Yahoo the command is originurlextension:)
address of , phone number of , phone listings for – only on Ask.com; by replacing with a person’s name it can look up the address/phone number if available.
Tags: search engine, search engine tips
