About Power Searching Strategies

Knowing how to do a search, how to do an advanced search, and how to use search operators goes a long way toward effective Google searching. But even knowing all that won't go all the way.

You need to combine all that technical information you acquired in the first tasks in this chapter with power searching strategiestechniques for crafting searches that give you results as close to possible to that for which you're searching.

Everyone has his own strategies for better searching, and so it's always a good idea to ask others for their ideas. But here are a few hints that should help you with your Google searches:

* Be specific The Web is an enormous place, containing literally billions of pages. Almost any search you do brings back far too much information. So make sure your search is as specific as possible. If you're looking for a history of the making of the album Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan, don't just search for "Blonde on Blonde". Try history "Blonde on Blonde" and you'll get better results.
* Be brief More is not always better when it comes to searching. Be as precise as possible with the terms you search for, and you'll get the best possible results. A short, precise search is much more effective than a rambling, imprecise one. So the search term history of castrati is better than history of castrati who were special boy child singers starting in 1600.
* Vary the order of search terms When you do a search, Google looks not only at the terms themselves, but at the order in which you type them. Google applies more weight to the first terms than it does to later terms in the search string. So use more important terms first. However, it's also worth trying to do a search that uses the same search terms, but with the order varied; rearranging your terms sometimes returns exactly the results you want.