Search Engine Tips
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! have become the tools that many people use to navigate through the Internet. They allow users to quickly find information about people, events, products, or other topics of interest. In fact, in the month of May alone, Google, the most popular search engine in the U.S. received over 60 million unique home visitors that spent an average of about 23 minutes on the site.
People use search engines to find pages faster than they could by guessing Web addresses or searching for URLs offline, but to receive the maximum benefit of search engines, they need to know how to search effectively. For example, both Yahoo! and Google allow users to search for exact phrases by putting quotation marks around the desired term. This can be useful in narrowing down the results you receive and making them more relevant. For instance, suppose you want to know what play the phrase To be or not to be comes from. If you just type that phrase into a Google search you will not receive any Shakespeare related results anywhere within the first 50 results. If, on the other hand you type “To be or not to be” in quotation marks, you will find a page that will answer your question in the first 7 results.
Below we have included some additional tips and shortcuts that can be used to make your searches on Google and Yahoo! faster and more productive.
define: word
- Returns the definition of any English word. Example: searching for Aurora returns information about Aurora, Colorado and searching for define: Aurora returns information about the atmospheric phenomenon
minus (-) sign before search term
- Removes results that contain a specified search term. Example: searching for USS Enterprise -star -trek -startrek will make sure that you only receive results pertaining to the aircraft carrier and not the TV show
term site:domain
- Only returns search results that are on the specified domain. Example: searching for NFL site:espn.com only returns pages on the ESPN site that contain the term NFL
stocks: ticker symbol
- Returns stock information for the desired company. You must use the ticker symbol and not the company name. Example: searching for stocks: yhoo returns current stock information for Yahoo! Inc.
The above list has a few helpful shortcuts that we feel will aid you in your searches but it is not an exhaustive list. You can find even more hints and shortcuts by browsing to the Google and Yahoo! advanced search and help sections.
