Friday, July 27, 2007

Search Engine Tips

If you want to search for an exact phrase enclose it in speech marks ie, if you were looking for gourmet recipes you could enter "gourmet recipes", the speech marks tell the search engine that you only want results that include that exact phrase instead of results that include both words in any order.

Firstly try and narrow down the results by including all the important keywords ie if you were looking for a website about fishing in spain, and you just entered fishing then you would have lots of results that may not be suitable, in the same way if you just entered spain you would again get a lot of results that were not appropriate.

Different search engines use different methods of returning results, for instance Google® uses a method called pagerank, this system returns results by working out a pages popularity by how many other pages link to that page, in other words if a certain website/page has a lot of different websites/pages linking to it and the content matches your search it will be higher in the results, it even checks to see if the websites/pages that link to it are of the same search criteria !! So you always get results that meet your original search as close as possible.

If you don't get results using all the keywords then try taking out certain keywords from your search, especially if you are enclosing your search in speech marks.

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