How To Search More Effectively
As everyone knows using a 'Search' engine can some times be frustrating as the internet has millions of web pages published for every conceivable topic and you can't always find what you're looking for.
Searches for topics can produce millions of results for example here are several products and the number of web pages found on a couple of leading search engines
| Yahoo | ||
| Fashion Clothes for Men | 11,400,000 | 12,200,000 |
| Jewelry | 134,000,000 | 337,000,000 |
| Hotels in Spain | 22,800,000 | 49,100,000 |
| Holidays in Mexico | 20,100,000 | 19,500,000 |
How can you reduce the number of web sites as the above illustration proves there are simply millions of web pages already published on the internet.
Firstly, its about searcher education because of the over whelming levels of web sites you should try to make a more 'defined' search to help the Search Engine deliver more appropriate results.
Let's look at making a defined search
!A search engine has to be told what you are looking for as it can only deliver results that you ask for
Let's look at the above example 'Fashion Clothes for Men'
By searching www.google.com and
searching for the phrase Fashion Clothes for Men
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,400,000 for fashion clothes for men.
(0.08 seconds)
You will see that Google return over 11 million results
www.yahoo.com returns similar results
for the same phrase
Results 1 - 10 of about 12,900,000 for fashion
clothes for men -
0.16 sec
Now these figures will vary and of course they are approximate but still they are overwhelming
If you look at the topics on the right hand top of the search results page that are underlined you will see that both Search engines searched for websites that contained the words 'Fashion' 'Clothes' & 'Men'
This means that the Search Engine will deliver ALL website pages that it has in its directory that contain or it thinks contains those 'keywords' both together and Seperately.
Now you do have several options, for example you may live in the UK and so do you really want to look at websites outside of the UK if not then you should try a local search on www.google.co.uk and not on www.google.com
!If you only prefer to view websites that are based in the UK you should first choose www.google.co.uk you will see the added option to tick pages from the UK
By going to www.google.co.uk you will see
So lets do the same exercise on the UK search only,
Now the same search for ' fashion clothes for men' returns just over 2 million web pages a dramatic reduction from over 14 million worldwide pages to 2 million
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,070,000 for fashion clothes for men. (0.19 seconds)
Now that means that you have instructed Google to only look for web pages that are based in the UK or have a .co.uk extension and this should help to define the search to provide results of what you want.
Another way to reduce the number of search results is to tell the Search Engine to ONLY deliver websites that contain the complete phrase Fashion Clothes for Men as that is what you are looking for.
To do this is simple take for example Google, alongside the search box you will see 'Advanced Search'
If you click on this option before you search you will see you are able to make many choices to instruct Google to define its search criteria for you and even the language or even the date of when the pages were created or updated and if those words are in the title or description. By using the Advanced features you can really define your search criteria and ' fine tune' the search to only deliver EXACTLY web sites that match your requirements.
!An easy way to instruct the search engine to only look for websites that contain pages with all the words you are looking for is to bracket your search words in speech marks like this "fashion clothes for men"
Now lets try that without using the advanced features page to see what happens on
- www.google.co.uk
- Tick UK sites only
- Search words in speech marks
Now you will see a defined search for "fashion clothes for men" delivers
only 1,740 Web pages
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,740 for "fashion
clothes for men".
(0.58 seconds)
If you look at the websites delivered you will see in bold the phrase you defined as being included in that website page text and thereby hopefully it should be more attuned to you search requirements
!These principles apply to Yahoo and other major search engines, so if you want to get better results from your favoured search engine you must remember to tell the search engine what you are looking for but more importantly what NOT to look for.
Instead of searching start finding what you want on the web
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