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It's so easy to get frustrated when you can't find what you are looking for on the Internet. Most people - unless they know the exact name of the company they are looking for- have a hard time finding relevant sites. So for all you folks out there, here's a quick primer in search:
Narrow Your Search
Use keywords to focus your query. Instead of "cocktails" (4,380,000 results on Google), try "vodka cocktails" (470,000 results), or define it a little more "vodka cocktail recipes" and --poof!-- we're down to 176,000 search results. A general rule of thumb is to use at least two keywords.
Know Your Stop Words
Stop words are common words, such as prepositions, single-letter words and other words such as "how" and "why" that search engines, such as Google, exclude from searches. If your stop word is important include it in a phrase with quotations around it.
Capitals - Schmapitals
Don't worry about using proper capitalization, as Google cannot deliver different results for different meanings. "Turkey" results will be the same as "turkey." AltaVista, however, does recognize and allow for capitalization.
Try Boolean Search
Use Boolean operators to improve your search results, the most common being "OR", "AND" (also"+") and "NOT" (also "-") For instance, let's say I were to ego surf and look for Charlotte Riley, to get rid of results relating to artist Charlotte Riley-Webb I would type in "Charlotte Riley -Webb." This reduces the results from approximately 796,000 to 649,000.
Other Tricks
If you still aren't finding what you are looking for, consider using advanced search operators such as:
allintitle: finds queries with specific words in the title of the page (example allintitle: riley)
allinurl: finds queries with specific words in the URL
link: discover all sites that link to a specific site, on Yahoo it is linkdomain:
site: lists all URLs from a specific site
Happy Searching!
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