Make The Most of Your Search Part 1

This is going to be a series of articles that is going to help you do exactly what the title suggests
“Make the most of your search”. In this series I hope to help my readers get a better understanding of how not only to enhance the way they search the internet, but open them up to new sources to find all sorts of good relevant information.

The first part of this series is going to be a few simple search tricks. There are things you can put into the search box of just about any search engine, especially Google that can help you find what your looking for a lot quicker. Some of these tricks will bring down the number of results you get from millions to thousands possibly hundreds, bringing you more relevant/quality information.

Quotations

The first little trick most people don’t know about is to put quotations around their search term. Now you may ask what does this do? Simple, when doing this the only results that will show up are ones that have those exact words in the exact order you typed them into the search box. For example if you just typed in dog training techniques you get 11,900,000 results. Now you will notice that the words you typed in may come up scattered throughout the listing, but not the whole phrase dog training techniques right in a row. Now go ahead and type in “dog training techniques” and you get back 29,200 results. WOW that is a drastic change in the number of results shown, and notice all the words in that phrase are all next to each other in a row. This one simple trick can help you find more quality results a lot quicker, being that this really narrows the search down quite a bit.

The next few tricks are all search strings that can greatly help you narrow down your results, especially when combined with the little quotation trick mentioned above.

allintitle:

The allintitle: is a search string. Simply all you have to do is type allintitle: and then without any space type in your search term. So for dog training techniques it will look like this allintitle:dog training techniques. What this will do is bring back search results that have the all the words in that keyphrase in the title of the webpage. Now doing this brings back 149 results, all with the words in that phrase within the title. Go ahead and put quotations around the term combined with the string and you get back 75 results. These are all high quality to someone searching for that term, because the exact words they are looking for are all located in the title so these pages must be good pages for dog training techniques.

allintext:

The next string is the allintext: now can you guess what this will do? If you can’t I of course will tell you. This works the same as the allintitle: string, except this will only bring back results that have your keyphrase in the text of the page as opposed to the allintitle: string which only shows results within the title. Now this doesn’t narrow down the results quite as much as the allintitle: string but that is simply because there is always way more text on a page then text within the title. Nevertheless this still helps narrow down the results from a plain search. And this too can be more narrowed down if you encase your search term within quotations.

allinurl:

On to the next string allinurl:, this string brings back only results that have your keyphrase in the URL of the webpage. Obviously this works the same as the other strings, you type the string directly followed by your search term. The quotations used here will show you only sites that have your search term not only just in the url, but the words exactly in a row, in the url. This as well can bring you back way more relevant results than just simply typing your search term in the search box and hoping for the best.

allinanchor:

Now this string may seem a little tricky, but I assure you its not. The results you will get back from this are results only with your search term somewhere within that webpage, as a link. So if we typed in allinanchor:dog training techniques, any website we goto from those results will have a link somewhere on that page within the text dog training techniques in it. For any internet marketers you will know precisely how this can help you out.

Now these are a few nice tricks that can really help you get back more quality relevant results. In the next article of this series I will be discussing a few strings that can help you search different type of file formats, such as Word documents, PDF’s, Excell documents, Powerpoint etc.

About the Author:
Steve Bis is the research manager for USCA. He writes articles concerning current credit card and debt related topics. Primarily focusing on debt settlement articles. http://www.debtconsolidationpodcast.com