What is the best way to find what you’re looking for when searching the Internet?
Do you use the best tools for your search?
Finding information on the Internet is easy if you know what to use and where to look. There are a few tricks I’d like to share with you to increase your effectiveness and reduce time spent on searching the Internet.
With over 100 million searches done every day on Google alone, most people automatically use this biggest search engine to find what are they looking for. But did you know Google is not always the easiest way to find the page you’re after? Depending on what do you seek, there are other ways to get the best results. There are also some search options within Google itself many people don’t know about. here are a few tips how you can increase your web search effectiveness.
In this post I’ll explain a bit about these tools:
1. Google Search Options
Google does pretty good job in finding pages that it thinks are most relevant to your search terms. There are a few commands you can use to narrow the search criteria and get even better results. Here is a list of the commands you can use in your search terms:
- OR – Search for either one, such as “price high OR low” searches for “price” with “high” or “low”.
- “-” – Search while excluding a word, such as “apple -tree” searches for “apple” where the word “tree” is not used.
- “+” – Force inclusion of a word, such as “Name +of +the Game” to require the words “of” & “the” to appear on a matching page.
- “*” – Wildcard operator to match any words between other specific words.
Some of the query options are as follows:
- define: – The query prefix “define:” will provide a definition of the words listed after it.
- stocks: – After “stocks:” the query terms are treated as stock ticker symbols for lookup.
- site: – Restrict the results to those websites in the given domain, such as, site:www.michalwurm.com. For example the option “site:.nz” will search only web sites from New Zealand.
- allintitle: – Only the page titles are searched (not the remaining text on each webpage).
- intitle: – Prefix to search in a webpage title, such as “intitle:google search” will list pages with word “google” in title, and word “search” anywhere (no space after “intitle:”).
- allinurl: – Only the page URL address lines are searched (not the text inside each webpage).
- inurl: – Prefix for each word to be found in the URL; others words are matched anywhere, such as “inurl:acme search” matches “acme” in a URL, but matches “search” anywhere (no space after “inurl:”).
The page-display options (or query types) are:
- cache: – Highlights the search-words within the cached document, such as “cache:www.google.com xxx” shows cached content with word “xxx” highlighted.
- link: – The prefix “link:” will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage, such as “link:www.google.com” lists webpages linking to the Google homepage.
- related: – The prefix “related:” will list webpages that are “similar” to a specified web page.
- info: – The prefix “info:” will display some background information about one specified webpage, such as, info:www.google.com. Typically, the info is the first text (160 bytes, about 23 words) contained in the page, displayed in the style of a results entry.
You can find more detailed information on Google search options here.
2. Delicious.com
Delicious.com is a social bookmarking website for storing, sharing, and discovering website bookmarks. It allows you store your favourite bookmarks online, organize them by assigning tags and share with others. Use of Delicious is free and the site is very easy to use.
People use Delicious to save links to pages they consider of good value. Because the bookmarks are organized by tags and the saved links are “human filtered” it makes Delicious the perfect resource when searching for interesting content. You can use it to discover fascinating articles from your industry you didn’t know about, find great pages full of useful resources or search for case studies and key facts about your industry.
Chris Brogan summed use of Delicious.com best:
So, the point is this: I use OTHER PEOPLE to find interesting information on the web, and not search engines. I use search engines to find targeted information.
I found Delicious to be an invaluable tool for organizing bookmarks and finding pages I wouldn’t find otherwise. For example when I searched to case studies and statistics about social media in business, Google brings up tons of pags, but finding the actual data is like looking for needle in a haystack. Search for socialmedia and casestudy tags on Delicious brought up the pages I was looking for straight away.
You can also see other people’s bookmarks and see what others deem interesting (for example to see all my bookmarks about social media go to http://delicious.com/michalwurm/socialmedia).
3. YouTube.com
Did you know YouTube is the worlds second largest search engine? There are over five billion videos on YouTube, making it almost one for every person on Earth. These days you can find almost anything on YouTube from video clips through funny videos to tutorials and lectures. Obviously if you just want to see a music clip of your favourite singer, YouTube should be the first place to look. But it is also a great learning resource. There are hundreds of thousands videos on how things work, software tutorials and product reviews. These days you can learn how to use a new software just by watching YouTube tutorials. If you are looking for a more academic resources I’d recommend installing iTunes and searching iTunes University which allows you easily search, download, and play education content from colleges and universities.
4. Twitter search
Many people still struggle to see the benefit of Twitter. It is a micro-blogging site where you can post short updates about what you are doing and connect with other users. It’s one of those services that is very hard to explain but once you start using it you’ll start seeing the power hidden behind it.
Let’s leave the ins and outs of Twitter for now and have a look at how you can use the Twitter search function. Twitter is very “live” site. There are 6,390,000,000 updates in the site to date (see the current count here) This makes Twitter a great tool when searching for trends, things that are happening “right now” and live feedback and opinions on products, brands, services or locations.
Do you want to know what people say about certain brand? Do a Twitter search. Traveling and want to know where’s a good place to stay? Ask on Twitter. You can also use sites like TwitterFall.com to see live tweets as they come in. Do that on a trending topic and you’ll be amazed by the volume of updates coming in.
5. Social Mention.com
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis tool that aggregates user generated content from across the internet into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
The ability to subscribe to RSS search feed or setup social alerts for your search terms make it an incredible tool to keep tabs on what people say about your brand or your competition.
Summary and examples
Here are a few examples of what tools deliver the best results for particular type of searches.
- Use Google for your generic day to day search queries.
- Use Delicious.com to discover new content other people deem interesting.
- If searching for case studies, reports or fact sheets, try Delicious first. If searching for a specific report and you know the report title, use Google.
- When searching for videos, try YouTube first.
- Want to learn how to use new software you just purchased? Look up video tutorials on YouTube.
- Looking for product opinions? Try searching on Social Mention, Twitter or Google “product name review”.
These are just some of ways to search for information, I hope you find the tips mentioned here useful.
How do you find good stuff on the internet?
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