If you're a frequent web user, you probably use Google or some other search engine nearly every day to find information about all sorts of subjects. Sometimes, however, searching can be a frustrating and time-consuming business. Search engines may be useful, but they work in a very rigid way. It's important to remember that they don't understand the content that they're finding for you, so it may be irrelevant.

However, there are ways to give search engines more detail about what you are looking for. You can do this by adding more terms to your search, using Boolean operators, or using the Advanced Search functions of the major search engines.

Adding more search terms to narrow down your search is a good start. As of September 2007, searching for "books" will retrieve about 697,000,000 results. That's a lot of pages, and most of them will not be anything like what you are looking for. Therefore you should refine your search: what sort of book-related sites are you looking for? Are you looking to buy books, read reviews, borrow books…? Often, just being more specific can help you to find what you want.

However, sometimes adding more search terms isn't enough; you need to explain further what sorts of results you want to read. In that case, you could use the Advanced Search page of your search engine. By default, when you perform a search, the search engine will assume that you only want pages returned which feature all of your search terms. However, the advanced search gives you all sorts of additional options, such as the option to look for pages which contain at least one of your terms, a particular phrase, and none of a specified selection of terms.

In this way, you can really narrow down your search and get closer to what you're looking for. However, there's an even more efficient way of performing advanced searches without visiting this page. You can search for specific phrases and so on from the standard search page by employing Boolean operators to help you. For the purposes of argument, this article will discuss the Google Boolean operators, but you should check which operators are supported by your preferred search engine.

Here's a quick list of the most useful Boolean operators:

foo OR bar

When you put "OR" between your search terms, pages will be returned which contain one or the other of these terms.

"foo bar"

Double quotation marks cause the search engine to return only pages which contain the complete phrase contained within the quotation marks.

foo -bar

A minus sign in front of a search term will cause the search engine to return pages which contain your other search terms, but not that search term. (If you wish to tell it to return pages which do not contain several terms, you should put a - in front of each of those terms.)

+and

A plus sign causes the search engine to take notice of "stop words" which are usually ignored, such as "and", "but", "I" and so on. The + term can therefore be useful for searching for Roman numerals, or queries about language (such as whether "an" or "a" should be used in front of a particular noun).

~foo

The tilde tells the search engine to search for the term and its synonyms. Again, it applies only to the term directly after the tilde, unless you use double quotations.

foo * bar

The asterisk causes the search engine to search for the terms with other words in between them.

There are more operators for Google which can be read about on their search operator cheat sheet.

By Iain Ford

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