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Using Search Engines More Effectively II - Advanced Searches by Chris Krawczyk

Last month we discussed some basic search engine techniques that will serve you quite well most of the time. This month we will continue our examination of search engine techniques, this time focusing on some more advanced search tactics for those special, hard to isolate, searches.

Google Advanced Search, shown below, is an excellent tool allowing you pinpoint what you are looking for even further. You can find a link to advanced search on any Google main search page.

Starting with find results, you can specify whether you want the search to be for all of the words (a normal search), the exact phrase (similar to using quotes), containing at least one of the words, or excluding words - or any combination of the four.

We don't recommend using "at least one of the words" too often as that will normally yield a ridiculous amount of search results. However, an important new concept being introduced above is one of exclusion. Without the words.

Continuing our example from last month you could search for Wilson Family Genealogy using the exact phrase and then add Idaho to the without the words field if you wanted to exclude results that contained the word Idaho from that list. This technique is very useful when you want to weed out a large volume of overwhelming extraneous results.

Let's say I was researching baseball history outside of the USA. Given that 90% of baseball sites are likely about Major League Baseball and baseball in America, I might try searching for the exact phrase "Baseball History" and exclude the words "USA, United States, America" from the results.

Advanced Search also gives you more options. Using the options on the form, you can search for pages:

- written in a certain language
- created in a certain file format
- that have been updated within a certain period of time
- that contain numbers within a certain range
- within a certain domain, or website
- that are available for anyone to use, share or modify, even commercially
- that don't contain "adult" material

Search Operators

Other than advanced search, there are a number of search operators you can use as a part of your normal searches. We'll address them below.

- Google ignores short common words in its searches. If you wanted to search for The King and I for example you should either use quotes "The King and I" or search for +The King +and +I. The plus sign forces the search engine not to omit those short words.

- If you want to search for synonyms put a tilde or ~ in front of the word. For example searching for ~big boats would likely also return large boats results as well. Searching for ~big ~boats might also return results for large boats, big ships, and large ships.

- You can use OR (uppercase) in your searches to specify alternate possibilities. For example, returning our Wilson example, you could search for "Wilson Family History" OR "Wilson Family Genealogy". The combination of quotes and OR can be a good one. Remember the uppercase OR for it to work.

This concludes our two part series on using search engines more effectively. We hope it helps you with your research. Please pass this information on to anyone that you feel might benefit from it. A properly defined search really is the key to finding those hidden gem websites that may help you with your research. Happy searching.

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