The web is a source of vast quantities of information, however with so much on offer it is often the case that it is difficult to find what you actually want. Here are a few tips to help you find ‘the wood in the trees.’

The are a whole gamot of different tricks you can employ, there are also enhanced features in many search engines such as ‘Advanced Search’ or ‘Picture Only’ searches. Here are a few basic practices that should help you get better/quicker results on your searches.

Be Specific
The less general your search criteria the more likely you are to find the results you require. As a general rule of thumb it is often best to start off very specific and then slowly widen the net until you get the results you are looking for.

Location, location
Remember that the web is global. If you are looking for a particular service in a region of a country then try including the name of the country/region in the search. Some of the search engines (Google) actually allow you to specify UK only on the search if you go to their .co.uk site rather than the .com site.

Order
Try enclosing a particular phrase you are searching for in quotes. That way the search engine knows to look for those words in that order, rather than just any random occurrence of the words within the website.

Browse
If your search does not give you exactly what you want, have a look at some of the more promising sites that it does return. Often links from one site to another similar site can prove useful.

Shop around
There are several different companies offering search engines and although there are only three main strategies for how they collect their results, what they do with those results once they get them and how they index them for you to search through varies.

If you can’t find what you want on one engine try another.