How to get better help from Google's search engine.

in #education7 years ago

Google is a multinational company which has evolved from a search engine to owning today many valuable projects.

The search engine also evolved into a sophisticated yet not perfect tool.

It is said that a tool is as good as its user.

And so I'm sharing here things I've learned that improve the accuracy of results for my queries.

A search engine is a bot that "speaks" bots language. If we want it to understand us, we should, in some way, also speak his language, trying to ask our question in a more sophisticated way.

I'm bringing here something called operators.

Operators are directions that guide the search engine in a peculiar way towards an answer.


PART 1.

1. "Double Quotes"

When looking for a phrase, it's good to put it between double quotes to receive more accurate answers. The bot will provide results with the right words in the exact order.

Typing the phrase without the quotes will result in pages containing the words also in a different order or including not all the phrase's words.

Please notice the number of results in both pictures, in quotes is smaller than the other.


Please see cigar and pipes as first result and pipes and cigars in the second place.

2. Tilde. ~

Using the tilde operator will provide also related to the searched word results.

Please see that when searching for the word hunter, the bot provided results also for hunter boots.


3. And.

Typing the word and between two words sends the search engine to provide results containing both words.


4. Or.

Typing the word or between two words sends the search engine to provide results containing one or the other word in the suggested result.


5. Wildcard Search. *

Using the asterisk is giving the bot the option to replace unknown text with one or more words instead.

Please see below, run-learn-memorize-fasting results on the same page. 


To be continued...

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Very good post.
Keep up your excellent work!