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Ten Tips for Better Searching [Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 3]MWS Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 3 Ten Tips for Better Searching Minnick Web Services specializes in creating and maintaining Web sites and electronic publications for business magazines and publishing companies. As a result, we and our clients work with a lot of content. To more effectively serve our clients, I've learned to use search engines for much more than just the typical keyword searches. In this issue of the Minnickweb newsletter, I'll share a few of the more interesting and useful search engine tips and tricks I've found. Since it's probably the most widely-used search engine, I'll focus on Google. Tip #1: Site Search. If a site doesn't have a search engine, or if the search engine doesn't work very well, you can search the pages Google has indexed for that site by typing "site:" followed by the site address. For example, to search for references to Elvis Presley on Microsoft.com, you could type:"elvis presley" site:microsoft.com Tip #2: If you're looking for a phrase or a combination of words, put quotes around it. "The buck stops here" won't return pages that talk about male deer. Tip #3: Find out who's linking to a specific page on a site by using "link:" For example, to find sites that link to the New York Times homepage, use link:www.nytimes.com Tip #4: Use "intitle:" to find occurrences of a word or phrase in the page title. For example: intitle:Healthy Candy . If you just want to find pages that have all of the keywords you search for in the title, use "allintitle:" Tip #5: Try the Advanced Search. You probably look at it 100 times a day, but try clicking the advanced search link next time you get stuck trying to find something Tip #6: Google's Topic-specific searches. At the bottom of the advanced search form are several topic-specific search links. These allow you to do amazing things like search the full text of books, search only government sites, search scholarly papers, and more. Tip #7: Check out Google Labs. It's not very well advertised on Google, but http://labs.google.com/ has links to some of the coolest things on the Web, and more are being added all the time. Tip #8: You can get tracking information for packages by simply pasting the tracking number into Google. Google magically knows which carrier the number is for by the number of digits. Here's a test UPS number to try: 1Z9999W99999999999 Tip #9: If you get tired of clicking on the 'next' link or the tiny numbers to see the next page of results, go to the http://www.google.com/preferences and change the number of search results per page to something much higher than the default of 10. I have mine set at 50. Tip #10: To find pages by searching for words AND their synonyms, use the synonym operator, ~. For example: Italian ~food will return results that contain "restaurant" as well as "food". Bonus Tip: Want to find out what some synonyms for "food" are? Google can't really help you with that. Try searching for "synonym food" on Yahoo. For more information about how Minnick Web Services can help you achieve your goals, please visit our (newly redesigned) web site (http://www.minnickweb.com) or contact us. ------ Complete Archives and Subscription Information ------ Chris Minnick |
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