Article | Search better on the Net

Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post.



Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe

The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.



Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.



Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”



See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.







Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.



Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”







If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like :

"chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless"

Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.

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