Searching the web more effectively doesn’t really take much effort. There are slight changes you can make to your searches to better explain to the search engine what it is you’re looking for. Plus, most of them have advanced options you can use to make an even better ultra-targeted search. Below are some tried and true web search techniques that work with virtually any search engine, along with a few basic web search skills you need to have for truly successful web searches. For example, entering coffee when trying to find coffee shops in Michigan would provide far too many unnecessary results. Typing cat when you’re in need of a drawing of a black cat, is just as unhelpful. However, modifying it slightly to include the type of coffee or cat you want and the specific location or color you’re looking for, is usually enough to provide the results you’re after. When you search the web with quotes, you drastically cut down the number of results that the search engine shows you, making a hyper-focused set of results. Here’s an example where we’re grouping two sets of words so that each set will be searched just as they’re typed here: This shows results that include Los Angeles instead of other pages that could otherwise include “los” or “angeles,” such as Los Pinos, Los Cocos, Angeles National Forest, etc. The same is true for the second half. Since we want to find apartments for rent and not for sale, and we want to avoid other things for rent like houses and condos, we use quotes for better results, ensuring those three words are next to each other. An audio search engine is one example where the website or app is built specifically for finding audio files, whether they be sound clips, music, effects, etc. A search engine that focuses on only videos or images, for example, is unhelpful if you’re looking for music files. People search engines are available, too, as well as image search engines, invisible web search engines, job search engines, torrent search engines, and others. Niche search engines might be helpful, too. This web search tip involves Google’s “site” option. Here’s an example where we’re looking for something on Lifewire: The same technique works for restricting the results to a particular top-level domain, such as GOV: Say you’re searching for Tom Ford, but you get lots of results for Ford Motors. Fixing this is easy by combining the quotes trick you learned above with the minus/hyphen key: Now, the results include only pages that mention Tom Ford, and the search engine removed those pesky car results. Not all web pages are cached, but Google provides a simple way to check. You can do this if the site won’t open for any reason, like if it was taken down, or it won’t load correctly due to traffic overload. However, the cache option on Google doesn’t work for really old web pages. The alternative way to search through a site that’s no longer live on the internet is to find it on Wayback Machine. A simple example can be seen with Yahoo Search. When you search for images on that site, you can pick a specific color, size, and type of image to look for. A video search is similar, but lets you pick a length and resolution to look for. Lots of web search tools have advanced options. You can see some examples in our list of Bing’s advanced search tricks and Google Images’ search options article. A handy advanced search option that works on Google is to find files. You can use Google to find files like PDFs, Word docs, and other kinds. For other sites, look for a Filter, Advanced, Tools, More Options, or similar button/menu around the search bar. A wildcard might be the asterisk (*), hashtag (#), or question mark (?), but the asterisk is the most common. Here’s an example where we want to search for truck rentals in California, but we’re not specific as to where in the state the rental company has to be. We’ll get better results with quotes because we’re looking for lists that show all the best truck rental companies in various areas. Here’s a similar search that would drastically change the results, showing us all sorts of rental businesses, but only in San Jose. Fortunately, every web browser lets you do a keyword search on that page. This is a bit similar to the site search you learned above, but instead of just locating the pages that include those words, this trick shows you exactly where on the page the keyword appears. To do this, use the Ctrl+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac) keyboard shortcut to get a prompt that asks you what you’re looking for. Most mobile browsers support a find function, too, usually hidden away in the menu. For example, if you end up on a web page about a person you were researching, and you want to quickly see if the page mentions anything about the year 2005, you can use the shortcut to enter 2005. This will highlight every instance of it on the page and let you quickly jump to each line. Bing, Yahoo, Startpage.com, Yandex, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo are a few examples. If one search engine isn’t helping you find what you’re looking for, you might have better results with a different one. Some of them use different algorithms and have unique filtering options that can ultimately show you different results than another one. If you’re not sure which one to use, consider Dogpile. It combines a few of them into one to help you get better results without bouncing around to different sites.
