Tips : Information Searching Techniques

Hi peeps!

Last Saturday is my 2nd class for this semester. My journey start at 7.00 a.m (Malacca - Shah Alam) and end at 11.30 p.m (Shah Alam - Melaka). Haze was my friends along the way to Shah Alam and back to Malacca. The IPU in Shah Alam was 190 (critical). The haze also followed me the classroom. Because I can smell smoke. I'm a bit worried about the air quality these days. (>.<) 

In my 2nd class, I learned about Boolean search, proximity search, truncation and wild card. So today I would like to share about searching technique through Google. These days, everyone is expected to be up to speed on Internet search techniques. Everyone including students, researchers, writers, etc. requires information, and they use search engines for that very reason.  But there are still a few tricks that some users and even savvy searchers may not be aware of.

TECHNIQUES

1. Keep It Simple

Keep your search simple and web-friendly. type minimum to minimum words that search engine database can understand easily and simply, and can retrieve maximum to maximum result from the database, means; minimum words = maximum results. If then too, you don’t get the desired result, increase the words gradually to get the good result.

For example: To know the population of India, if you type in the Google search bar,

·         “How many people live in India” (lengthy one, gives few result)

·         “India population” (Sweet and short, gives good result)

2. Skip Unnecessary Parts

Search engine like Google is smart enough to handle most of your typos, and other things that could just be ignored. That’s why you should skip those things in your query to save time.

You should not worry about the following when writing a search query:

·         Spelling

·         Cases (uppercase or lowercase)

·         Punctuation (dot, question mark, exclamation mark, and more)

·         Special characters (plus, minus, brackets, and more)

3. Use the minus operator (-) to narrow the search

Terms with multiple meanings can return a lot of unwanted results. The rarely used but powerful minus operator, equivalent to a Boolean NOT, can remove many unwanted results. For example, when searching for the insect caterpillar, references to the company Caterpillar, Inc. will also be returned. Use Caterpillar -Inc to exclude references to the company or Caterpillar -Inc -Cat to further refine the search.

4. Social Search

You can search for people and their social profiles using:

·         +[profile-name]

By adding a ‘+’ before a profile-name, you can search for Google+ profiles and pages.

For example: [+buddiestravelogue]

·         #[word]

Using the ‘#’ before a word enables you to search for hashtags in Google+, Twitter, and more social networks.

For example: [#travelogue]

·         @[person-name]

You can search for social accounts associated with a person’s name by putting the ‘@’ sign before his/her name.

For example: [@buddiestravelogue]

5. Synonym Search

Using the tilde symbol (~) before a word tells Google to search for the words and its synonyms too. Type your search query in the format of [~synonym Word other Words] to search for the word and its synonyms in a single search.

6. Don't use common words and punctuation

Common terms like a and the are called stop words and are usually ignored. Punctuation is also typically ignored. But there are exceptions. Common words and punctuation marks should be used when searching for a specific phrase inside quotes. There are cases when common words like the are significant. For instance, Raven and The Raven return entirely different results.

7. The plus operator (+)

As mentioned above, stop words are typically ignored by the search engine. The plus operator tells the search engine to include those words in the result set. Example: tall +and short will return results that include the word and.

8. The wildcard operator (*)

It called as fill in the blank operator. For example, amusement * will return pages with amusement and any other term(s) the search engine deems relevant. You can't use wildcards for parts of words. So for example, amusement p* is invalid.

9. The OR operator (OR) or (|)

Use this operator to return results with either of two terms. For example happy joy will return pages with both happy and joy, while happy | joy will return pages with either happy or joy.