The abilities of a search engine to pull certain information from the World Wide Web and filter it to specifics of a user are an incredibly resourceful and a vast time saver utility used many times everyday to seek information. A search engine is a program that finds web sites, web pages, images, videos, news, maps, and other information related to a specific topic. The way this program works is by entering the search text, which is the word or phrase that additional information is needed on. The search engine then pulls results using formulas. The formulas are usually unknown; this is done to protect the success of the search engine’s guidelines when finding results, this process is what distinguishes the different search engines available.
The art of search engine punctuation has many tips that help eliminate and narrow the particulars on a search. I will share some tips I use when using a search engine to get exactly what information I’m looking for. By using the tips below it could make using a search engine that much easier, and provide an agent for weeding out unwanted results.
If the quotes ( “ ) punctuation is used, this tells the search engine that you want the results of that phrase in the exact same order. It is used when trying to find information on a certain person, or a famous quote or phrase. It would otherwise search for those words in everything, which would give results that had just one of the words. Another good tip would be asterisk (*) punctuation, this is used as a joker form; it holds space for anything to be replaced. For example, if you put Gainesville*, results would include Gainesville Sun, Gainesville restaurants, or Gainesville Nightclubs. It broadens the search to help find what is being researched. The use of OR in a phrase in a search engine will bring up results for either searched word. It helps grab more results because either word can cause the search engine to use it as a result.
There are many options when finding a search engine to use. In fact, some search engines offer a wide variety of perks for using their site. Yahoo! allows a user to create an email, play games, check the weather, and change the whole layout of the website down to the colors and what widgets you’d like to see every time you visit their site. Yahoo! is my personal favorite, however, other top search engines are Google, Dogpile, Ask, Bing, and MSN. There are many others out there and finding the one that gives you as the user the most benefit is a must.
Below is a screenshot of Yahoo! results using the search engine and altering it with one of the commands to show the advantages of using the commands. The first shot is of a search engine getting results for Red Bull, the second shot is of using the OR command with Red Bull OR coffee. The example shows that using the OR command gets a lot more results, which is the reasoning behind the OR command. The red bull search resulted in 45.8 million hits while the red bull OR coffee resulted in 135 million hits, a much broader result. This command creates an expanded list to help someone looking for both red bull and coffee results. This saves time by performing two different searches at the same time.
A list of other options to help in your search engine etiquette is listed below. It has some very interesting commands that make using a search engine easier and less of a hassle.
*Pictures were screenshot by myself from Yahoo.com
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