How to Search the Web

A lot of folks who spend time surfing the web might snort a bit and answer that question with, "Not very well." They wonder why it isn't easier to find what they are looking for. All I can say is if computers were put on the earth to keep us humble, the World Wide Web was handed up to make us blushing, sniveling fools.

Many people erroneously feel that conducting a search on a Search Engine is an intuitive process. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Take that notion and throw it out the window. Rather than warm, fuzzy intuitive logic, most Search Engines use whatever logic they deem most suited to give you a listing of relevant results.

To make matters worse, the bright boys and girls who define these logics are fighting a mighty battle. For every MIT 4.0 GPA wizard who works at Yahoo or AOL, there are a couple dozen working for the pornographic sites and the Search Engine Optimization companies. Ah, the spy and intrigue of it all. Needless to say, he relevancy formulas change often.

If you want to research like a pro you will need to learn Boolean logic. However, if you are just looking to get the best results for the least time invested let's take a quick trip back to grade school. Yippee, Skippy, it's time for math.

Let's say you are trying to find out what to do with the cute little baby chick good old Mom so kindly presented to your kids on Easter morning. To preserve your role as being-the-best-parent-possible, you have ruled out roasting it for Easter dinner. Rather, you have decided to keep it. "It will teach the kids how to be responsible", you say. So you sit down at the computer with darling Chicken Little in your lap and you type the following words into the search box of your favorite Search Engine.

how do I take care of a chicken

Oh dear, Google.com (my preferred Engine) delivers up 470,000 possible sites, most concerning tasty chicken recipes. That won't do. In order to get relevant results it helps to know some of the universal (almost) "search qualifiers". What you want are hints on caring for chickens. If you type in chickens with the + sign and care. Your search would look like this:

chicken +care

Bingo, that did it. Now you have lots of sites to help you and your kids raise Chicken Little to be healthy and happy. That was easy. In most Engines, for simple searches like the above, you don't even need to include the + sign any more.

Here is a nifty trick. If you want your words cemented together, put quotes around them. This time we are going to go looking for some nifty sports cars to zip around the Hills in. You don't want to pull up every site that has the word sports in one spot and cars in another. So type in:

"sports cars"

Google pulls up 2,860,000 sites for sports cars without the quotes and a mere 339,000 with quotes. Lets say we want to find sites that focus on antique sports cars. Here goes:

antique +"sports cars"

Here come 7300 sites to choose from. Incidentally, if you place &qupt;antique sports cars" all in quotes Google only pulls up 38 sites. That might be a bit too restrictive. "Too many corvettes," you say. Then try this:

antique +"sports cars" -corvette

The minus sign eliminates any sites that mention the word corvette. If you use these techniques your research will be more efficient and go much faster. It should leave you plenty of time to take an outing in your newly acquired beautiful, antique sports car. This is your chance to show your well nurtured baby chick to the world. Oh, that's not the type of "chick" you had in mind? Well, head over to Google.com and let the search begin.