Tip #51 - Refining Your Internet Searches

100 Computer Tips in 100 Days

Tip #51 - Refining Your Internet Searches

Are you surprised by some of the results you get when you do an Internet search? The search engines try to identify for you the websites that best fit your search terms. If you were to search for “turkey burgers” your results will include pages that have general turkey recipes as well as information about burgers, not necessarily only burgers made from turkey meat.  To find pages devoted specifically to turkey burgers, enclose the term in quotation marks. This is particularly helpful if you’re looking for “John Q Public” or anyone else. By putting quotation marks around their name it will be looking for people with that specific name.

Here are some other, lesser known search modifiers:

intitle:admissions searches for the word admissions in the title assigned to the page by the programmer

inurl:admissions searches for the word admissions in the URL

related:www.nbc.com will show similar pages to nbc.com

minus in your search removes that word from the page “cats –dogs” results in finding pages that mention cats but not dogs.

Also, don’t bother putting “the”, “and”, “of” and so forth in web searches unless they are part of a longer phrase within quotation marks.

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Happy computing!

Diane

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