A person could go myopic sifting through pages of search results from Google and Yahoo! I keep a bottle of eyedrops on my desk just for that reason. Unfortunately, nothing can restore the time I lose by a poorly structured search. In a perfect world, I could immediately guess the most effective keywords that might also be the exact keywords selected by a web developer to tell the search engines how to index a specific page. But, there is very little precision in language and, although choosing the right keywords might help lessen the strain on our eyes and our time, learning the capabilities of our favorite search engines will give us the best results.
For example, did you know that certain keywords, or rather "meta terms" trigger more optimized and immediate search results? Let's say you want to know the current weather in El Paso, Texas. Enter the following as your search terms:
weather el paso
and immediately, you'll see the temperature and forecast for that day. Here's what Google showed me for June 20, 2006, as the top search result. With this information, I had no need to browse any of the other search results.
Weather for El Paso, TX, 93°F Clear, Wind: S at 8 mph, Humidity: 15%
Tue, Mostly Sunny, 100° | 70°
Wed, Mostly Sunny, 99° | 69°
Thu, Mostly Sunny, 97° | 70°
Fri, Mostly Sunny, 95° | 69°
Similarly, you can search current stock quotes by simply plugging in the stock symbols. Go ahead and enter the following as your search term in Google.Com or Yahoo.Com:
GOOG
Then go over to the other of the two search engines and type:
YHOO
The results will tell you that, on June 20, 2006, Google stock was trading at about 10 times the price of Yahoo even though they both give you the same Nasdaq data delayed by only 15 minutes.
Do you want to find the nearest gas station in your area? Type in "gas" and your zip code and you'll immediately see a list that includes the distance from the center of the zip code provided. For example, to view the nearest gas stations to downtown Fort Lauderdale, type:
gas 33301
The nice thing about that search is that you might also get a great link to find relatively current gas prices in your area. I found this MSN link that allows me to search gas prices by zip code:
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http://autos.msn.com/everyday/gasstations.aspxOther keyword shortcuts for Google and Yahoo offer quicker access to currency conversion, airline flight tracking, maps, phone directories, images, definitions and much more. Visit these links to learn more:
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http://www.google.com/help/features.html *
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-01.htmlThe conversion features in Google are particularly impressive. Type or paste in the following search terms and check out the results:
pints in a gallon
5 british pounds in south korean money
32 degrees celsius in fahrenheit
In addition to optimized search terms, there are search strategies and special syntaxes that can help to add or filter results as needed. If I were looking for information regarding cardiac disease in this country and wanted to limit it to women, I might include the phrase "American women" in my search, but would I use the phrase "cardiac disease" or "heart disease"? With Google, I can search synonymous terms by adding a tilde [~] immediately in front of a particular keyword as follows:
"American women" ~cardiac disease
I'm not sure if Yahoo has a similar tag designation to allow a search of synonymous terms. Also, notice I placed quotation marks around "American women" which forces the search engines to look for the exact phrase.
Conveniently, both Google and Yahoo recognize certain special syntaxes to increase the effectiveness of a particular search. For example, if you're looking throughout the entire indexed Internet for a specific file type, you would type filetype:[extension] (with no space between filetype: and the [file extension]) and then any additional keyword search you like. Let's say you're looking for available Powerpoint presentations regarding women and heart disease. You could type the following:
filetype pt women's heart health
and you would find several informative Powerpoint presentations which tell you heart disease is the leading cause of death among American women, outpacing cancer.
Other popular syntaxes allow you to search a particular site or a site URL (web address). For example, let's say I wanted to search all Yahoo help pages to see if I could find other cool shortcuts. I might try searching (through Google or Yahoo):
help tips site:www.yahoo.com
- or -
yahoo.com inurl:tips
Here are some more great links to help you locate search strategies, shortcuts, tips, and special syntaxes that will save your tired eyes and your limited time:
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http://www.google.com/help/operators.html *
http://faculty.valencia.cc.fl.us/infolit/Google/help.htm *
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips N. Saco is a contributor and founder of several information web sites, including WomensWebWatch.Com and WetwareSolutions.Com. Her blog is located at InternetExplorerBlog.Com and a copy of this article can be found there. She has a degree in Communications, focusing in critical analysis, a minor in cultural anthropology, and 20 years experience in research, writing and investigation, primarily in medical litigation support. [This article may be freely distributed at no charge to your readers along with the author's bio and web links. Copyright 2006 Nikki Saco. All other rights reserved.]
