Thursday 12 May 2011

How To Search Faster on Google.com

Trying to remember the last quote from your favorite movie? “Google it.” Looking for a new recipe for chicken wings? “Google it.” Searching for more opinions about a particular political stance? That’s right, “Google it.” With information readily available at your fingertips, finding answers on the web has never been easier. However, finding exactly what you were looking for may end up taking some time. With the all the information found on the Internet, at times, you might find yourself overwhelmed with the search results generated by Google’s search engine. Fortunately, there are ways to narrow your results and find your answers faster.

* Use phrases, not keywords. Typing words into the search field will make Google to treat each word as a keyword. As a result, you end up with over 7 million matches to your query and none of which are of actual help. One trick in limiting the amount of search results is to identify the words in your search as a phrase rather than independent keywords. Placing your search words in between quotation marks will narrow the results to the websites that contain those words in that particular order. For example, searching “chicken noodle soup” will bring up any website that contains “chicken,” “noodle,” or “soup.” Whereas placing the search ‘“chicken noodle soup”’ in the field will only bring up sites that contain that phrase.
* Use multiple phrases. If your search phrase yields fewer results than expected or becomes too intricate to find any matches, you have the option of breaking the search into multiple phrases or phrases with keywords. Placing a “+” in your search query will concatenate search phrases when dealing with more than one phrase. Going back to the “chicken noodle soup” example, if you happen to be looking for the perfect cooking temperature, you may be inclined to enter “Cooking temperature for chicken noodle soup.” Sure enough, you may not find the answer you’re looking for. Using the plus sign to break your phrase down, entering ‘”chicken noodle soup” + “cooking temperature”’ will make the Google search engine look for sites that contain both phrases in no particular order. Keep in mind, you may find yourself staring at a lot more websites than before.

* Cut on loading time. Another way to help shorten the time spent searching for a particular answer from Google’s search results is to load multiple sites at one time. Instead of having to click each search result and hoping that the website has the exact answer you were looking for, it may be faster to open several websites at once instead of one at a time. By right clicking on each result that is of interest and clicking on “Open in a new tab,” you’re able to load multiple websites at one time. This will cut back on the time wasted on navigating through various pages of a site only to find out that the answer you were looking for isn’t there. This also saves from having to click the “back” button on your browser multiple times just to return to Google.


Regardless of how easy Google’s search engine has made your life, shortening the amount of time spent on each query can only enhance your experience. Using these tips will better help define your questions and allow you to spend more time reading your answers rather than searching for them.

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