In this article I am going to give you five great tips on how to find what you want easier on the internet, specifically by using search engines. You just wouldn’t believe how many people use the search engines and don’t really find what they set out to. Just using one of these easy tips can greatly improve the quality of information you will find.



1. Using quotations for exact phrase matching.

Simply by placing quotations around the search term you can really narrow down your search. There is one thing though, this tip is only useful if you are using more than one word to search. What the quotations does are only show results from the search engines that have the words you typed in, exactly in the way you typed them in. For example if you typed in dog training techniques as your search term without the quotations you will notice in the search engine results that those three words are scattered all throughout the listing. You can tell easily because your words are bolded. Now if you throw quotations around your search term the only results that you would get back are only ones that have those three words right next to each other as you typed them in, as opposed to being all over the listing. This little trick becomes extremely useful especially when you are being very specific with your search, which brings me to my next tip.

2. Be specific.

The great thing about search engines is that they all have billions of web pages listed into their index, which is their database of web pages. So you must take advantage of this, and by that I mean be as specific as possible with your search. If you are looking for healthy dog food for your new puppy then type in something like healthy food for your new puppy. I can’t stress this enough if you are really searching for something then be specific or you will just get lost. Now if you take this and use the quotations you can find what your looking for really quick. So for example you may have a question in your head such as. What’s the healthiest puppy food? This is getting specific, now go ahead and throw quotations around your question and if the search engine returns any results there you go your question was answered pretty quickly. Now if you just typed in puppy food, and didn’t even use quotations then you’re in for quite a long search.

3. Browse more than one search engine.

This sounds very elementary. However, I see far too many people that have some strict love passion with Google and if they can’t find it there they give up. Now Google is a great search engine I love them, but they don’t have every single web page on the internet in their index. So if your one of those people that loves the big G then go ahead search them first. I find though that to really get the best possible answer for those burning questions that searching through multiple engines is the way too go. I don’t know how many times I went to Google first and didn’t get what I want, so I set off to Yahoo or MSN and find the information right away. All the search engines have different results. Yes some web pages you may find in all of them, but for the most part if you do the same search in three different engines the top ten results will vary greatly. So I urge you please use more than just one, you are much more likely to find what you were looking for.

4. Use the search command allintitle:

This tip is very useful and very easy to use just as the quotations are. When you type in allintitle: (and you need to put the colon) the only results the search engine will return are ones that have your search term in the title of the page. The title is the blue bar at the top of your browser. The reason this is so useful is because anyone who makes web pages puts the topic of their site in the title of their web page. So if you were looking for dog training techniques you would type it in like this,

allintitle: dog training techniques

It really is just that easy all you have to do is type in allintitle: then whatever your looking for and trust me finding web pages that have your search term in the title of the page will be very relevant to what your looking for. If you want to take it one step further use my first tip here and put quotations around your word too, thus not only returning you results that have your words in the title, but they will be found in the title exactly the way you typed them in. Which is very powerful. So that would look like this.

allintitle: “dog training techniques"

Believe me to add these two elements to your search and you will save a lot of time.

5. Search article directories.

This last tip is straying away from the search engines, but I find that there is just so much information to be found in article directories. Just goto any search engine and type in article directories and look through them. There are thousands of them. The reason they are so useful is that every single day authors submit their articles to these directories to get themselves more exposure and recognition. However there are literally thousands of topic categories to look through and they are all labeled. One of the best on the internet is ezinearticles.com, and this directory has a huge abundance of topics to read on and thousands upon thousands of published articles. I find these to be sometimes just as useful to get some of my questions answered then using the search engines.

I hope you found these tips to be useful and more so I hope you use them next time your searching the internet. Trust me even using just one of these tips will help you get better content to search through and it will definitely save you time and we all know how important someone’s time is.