The most common way most people use Google to search for information; is to just type in a few words and click on the search button. However, as Im sure you know, you are normally confronted with many thousands of pages to wade through, sometimes millions, so it can often be very hard to find exactly what youre looking for.
Here are 5 useful tips to help you find stuff faster, when you are using the Google search engine:
1. Use The Exact Phrase Search Option
When you do a basic search, Google returns results for all web pages that contain the words you typed in.
For example, you may want find information about a car you want to buy. You might type in: used Mercedes
Google will return web pages containing both the keywords used and Mercedes, somewhere on the page. You might find a web page containing a story, where the word used is near the top of the page, and the word Mercedes is at the bottom of the story. There might not be any mention of the exact phrase used Mercedes anywhere on the page.
So, to narrow things down, put the phrase inside quotation marks like this:
used Mercedes
Google will now only display results for web pages containing the exact phrase of used Mercedes
2. Be More Specific With Your Searches
To narrow down your search even further, you should try expanding on your initial keywords, by adding more specific words and phrases. If you are looking for a particular car model, try adding that to your search like this:
used Mercedes C280
This will weed out a lot of pages that contain information on used Mercedes cars, but not necessarily the C280 model you want.
3. Remove Words From The Search Results
When you perform a search for used Mercedes C280, you might get a lot of web pages in the search results for sites selling Mercedes car parts. You could end up trawling through dozens of cart part sites, just to find the ones with cars for sale.
Heres what you can do
For any search you perform, you can remove pages from the search results if they contain certain keywords you specify. To do this, all you have to do is add the word to the search box, and place a minus symbol directly before it.
used Mercedes C280 -parts
Make sure that there is no space between the minus symbol and the word you want removed from the search results. If you put a space in between it wont work.
4. Use the OR Command To Expand Your Search
Sometimes web pages will contain the information you want, but it might not contain the exact phrase you type in. Using our Mercedes example, some people might just refer to it as just C280 without using the word Mercedes.
By using Googles OR command you can find web pages containing at least one of the words you choose.
Mercedes OR C280
The above search would return any web page that contains either just the word Mercedes or the word c280, or both of them on the same page. To make this work, you must type OR in capital letters. This tells Google that you want to use their advanced search option. If its in lower case, Google will just treat it like any other word.
5. Try Using The Synonym Search Option
For many phrases there are often alternative words that can be used to explain the same thing. Sometimes its hard to know which particular word to use to get the best results. Other times you either may not be aware of the alternative word, or just cant think of it at the time.
For example, instead of using the term used, you may have typed in secondhand. A trick you can use is to tell Google to look for synonyms of the words you specify, in addition to the main keyword. To do this, enter a tilde ~ just before a word like this:
~secondhand
In this case, Google returned results containing the words: secondhand and used. This can be a useful trick to use if you cant think of the right words to type in. You can perform a synonym search on multiple words at he same time. Just add a tilde ~ directly before each word like this:
~secondhand ~car
As well as used, secondhand and car; this search will now also return pages containing automobile and motor, because they are synonyms for the word car.
I hope you found this useful, happy searching!
Jason Lewis is creator of the Find Stuff Quickly video series. A step-by-step video guide; showing you how to use the Google search engine, and its many powerful tools. To download the videos or watch online, visit:
It is now well known that Google has an ageing delay in its algorithm. What this means is that a new site will not, during an initial period, show up in queries made for that sites main keywords or key phrases, even if the site is well-optimized. Some people have referred to this as the Google Sandbox. If you have a new site the big questions are: 1. How long does this period last and 2. What should I do during the time when I will not get good results from Google searches
Search engines do not the publish the details of their ranking systems, so the answer to the question How long can only be a guess. Based on my experience I believe that the period is around one year. One year! That is a long time to wait for traffic from the Internets most important search engine. But who says that you have to sit around, wait and do nothing. Here is what you should be doing.
1. Optimize, Tweak and Test Your Website.
The other major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN do not have such a long ageing delay, and if you optimize your site properly it should appear in the listings of these search engines within a few weeks. Now, if you cant get a good ranking in Yahoo you will probably not get a good ranking in Google even after your site gets out of the Sandbox. So, while you are waiting to show up in Google, fine tune your site and aim for good positioning in Yahoo. This will bring you some traffic from Yahoo and MSN, and eventually, when the time is right, from Google itself.
2. Conduct a Campaign to Secure Links to Your Site
In addition to actual on-page optimization, ranking in Google is highly dependent on how many sites link to yours. Each link is counted as a vote for your site, and the quality and quantity of these links weighs heavily in Googles ranking system. While you are waiting to see your site in Google, it would be a good idea to get links from complementary sites, either by a reciprocal linking campaign or by getting your content placed on other sites, with a link back to yours.
3. Buy Traffic with a Reputable Pay-Per-Click System
While it is nice to get free traffic by being well placed in natural searches for your keywords, you can get traffic immediately if you are willing to pay for it. If your site has convincing copy and a strong call to action, then the ratio of paid customers to total visitors (known as the conversion ratio) should be high enough to pay for the costs of an Adwords campaign with Google or a search marketing campaign with Yahoo. One word of caution, if you opt for paid traffic, stick with the well known pay-per-click systems and do not try out unknown companies who sometimes provides tons of useless traffic at a high price.
So, dont despair if you dont see your site at the top of Googles rankings during the first few months. Take some constructive steps now and the day will come when your sites natural search engine positioning starts bringing you a steady stream of traffic.
Copyright 2005
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has beenworking on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, , a firm providing search engine optimization,copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. Hepublishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at