How to use Google Search effectively - Part 1

Remember that time you had to look for something online, and you couldn’t find it? And you had to go to someone else with it and they found what you were looking for in a matter of seconds? It’s not because they sacrifice a keyboard every month to the Google Gods. They just know how to get the most out of the search engine, by using the correct combination of search keywords and word syntax.

The internet can be thought of as a huge library containing a vast number of books. A search engine is your librarian. It knows each and every nook and cranny of the library, and can point you in the right direction. But the catch is that the librarian’s directions are only as good as your instructions to it. The better you are able to explain yourself to the librarian, the more accurate the directions. Once you look at it that way, it makes it somewhat easier to give instructions to search engines.

NOTE: This is a really long blog post, due to the fact that I really like giving elaborate explanations. If you don’t like reading a lot of text, maybe this article isn’t for you. You should probably get a friend to help you when you’re trawling the interwebz for “how to hack Facebook accounts” tutorials.

Know what you want  

                One of the main reasons why people are not able to find what they are looking for is that they don’t KNOW what they are looking for! You want to make that special fruit cake which your mom always made for you when you were little and you are looking for the recipe online. To get relevant search results, you need to know what the actual name for that ‘fruit cake’ is before you proceed, otherwise your search results will be diluted with any and every type of fruit cake recipes. This point is fairly common sense, but is often overlooked because people believe that search engines are smart enough to figure it out. A search engine isn’t smart; it’s just insanely fast at following instructions irrespective of their quality. You have to be as specific as possible with your search query.

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Imagine you want to make a logo for your blog, and you want it to be a cat. So do you want a photo of a cat, or a drawing/computer generated image of a cat? Chances are, if you’re making a logo, you want the latter. Back in the day when Google Search was a new thing, a ‘photo’ and an ‘image’ meant different things. A photo is a photograph which is available digitally. An image was something which was wholly made using computer software. Though now Google has gotten really good at predicting search patterns, and it found that people used the two terms interchangeably, usually searching for photos, so that distinction no longer exists.

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Nowadays, we have to use different keywords to describe such ‘images’, which leads us to our next point, which can be found here.