How To Make Good Use Of Google’s Search Operators by Craig Snyder.
From the post:
Some of you might not have the slightest clue what an operator is, in terms of using a search engine. Luckily enough, both Google and MakeUseOf offer some pretty good examples of how to use them with the world’s most popular search engine. In plain English, an operator is a tag that you can include within your Google search to make it more precise and specific.
With operators, you’re able to display results that pertain only to certain websites, search through a range of numbers, or even completely exclude a word from your results. When you master the use of Google’s search engine, finding the answer to nearly anything you can think of is a power that you have right at your fingertips. In this article, let’s make that happen.
8 Google Search Tips To Keep Handy At All Times by Dave Parrack.
From the post:
Google isn’t the only game in town when it comes to search. Alternatives such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Wolphram Alpha also provide the tools necessary to search the Web. However, the figures don’t lie, and the figures suggest that the majority of Internet users choose Google over the rest of the competition.
With that in mind it’s important to make sure all of those Google users are utilizing all that Google has to offer when it comes to its search engine. Everyone knows how to conduct a normal search by typing some words and/or a phrase into the box provided and following the links that emerge from the overcrowded fog. But Google Search offers a lot more than just the basics.
If friends or colleagues are using Google, I thought these posts might come in handy.
Speaking of the numbers, as of June 13, 2013, Google’s share of the search market was 66.7 percent. Bing was 17.9%, AOL, Inc. the smallest one listed, was at 1.3%. (What does that say to you about DuckDuckGo and Wolphram Alpha?)
Google’s majority share of the search market should be encouraging to anyone working on alternatives.
Why?
Google has left so much room for better search results.
For example, let’s say you find an article and you want to find other articles that rely on it. So you enter the title as a quoted phrase. What do you get back?
If it is a popular article, you may get hundreds of results. You and I both know you are not going to look at every article.
But a number of those articles are just citing the article of interest in a block of citations. Doesn’t have much to do with the results of the article at all.
But Google returns all of those, ranked for sure but you don’t know enough about the ranking to decide if two pages of search results is enough or not. Gold may be waiting on the third page. No way to tell.
Document level search results are just that. Document level search results. You can refine them for yourself but that’s not going to be captured by Google.
What is your example of improvement over the search results we get from Google now?