Search Resources

Although search engines work pretty well out of the box, as it were, a little tweaking never did much harm.

Remember not all search engines are identical, and not all of these commands work the same way (or at all) across different resources. Don't be scared to try them, though.

At Google.com and Google.co.uk the Inurl command works well. This specifies that any of the key words should appear within the URL of the returned sites. For example, if you want to uncover pages containing darlingtontown you would type in inurl:darlingtontown then press search.

The wildcard '*' in a keyword string. Whether you're looking for plurals or variations of a word, or just don't know the correct spelling, the simple use of a wildcard '*' can solve the problem. AOL wildcard is ? instead of the traditional * and Inktomi uses a * for single-charactor wildcarding, and a ? for multiple wildcarding.

With just a few simple ground rules
You can get the edge on most engines when compared to their vanilla default results.

For a start you should state the obvious. Say you want to find out about a problem with a Ford Galaxy car, don't just enter keywords of 'Ford' and 'Galaxy' and then trawl through thousands of results. Instead, try 'Ford Galaxy problems UK', which helps narrow it down to a more specific matter of problems and tells the engine you're more interested in the UK model than the US. Better still, go straight in with 'Leaking sunroof on a 2001 Ford Galaxy V6 UK', for example, and see what turns up - you may be pleasantly surprised.

We could improve that search by insisting on the returns having a UK bias by sticking a '+' symbol before the word UK. So the web pages returned will include that word as well as some of the others. For each word you want as a must-have, stick a + in front of it.
Similarly, to eradicate useless sites (if your initial search is scattered with hits from a fictional site called galaxycarsales.com, for example), you can insist on any hits containing that keyword are excluded by using a '-' symbol before it.

Sometimes you want to find a phrase, and just specifying two or more words isn't enough, as the search engine will look up for hit containing both of them separately. The solution lies with enclosing the phrase within double quote marks, So, to find pages about monkey nuts, you'd use "monkey nuts" to indicate a phrase.

Using this easy technique, it's possible to quickly learn to compose meaningful search queries that both yourself and the search engine will understand correctly.

Finding the answer to a question?
Another way to find the answer to question is not to ask the question in the first place! Instead start off answering it - Sounds daft but search engines 'cached' the details of the actual web pages and by starting off with the answer to a question the results are far better. Try these:

• How tall is mount everest
• The Elevation of mount everest is *

Happy surfing.....

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