Kurunegala Doctors' Club: Searching with Google

In the modern world, surfing the internet has a significant place, as it helps in finding the relevant information more easily & faster. Out of the search engines used for searching the internet, Google has a very high place. I am going to enlighten you on using Google search effectively.

The first thing to note is that we should use proper words to get proper results. More relevant the words to what you seek, more relevant will be the results returned. First take a moment to think what words would appear in the page that you want to seek.

More the number of terms entered in the search box, less amount of results will be returned.

For example, if we search for 'dog training', the number of results returned will be more than for searching 'dog training classes'

I did a search a while back & the number of results returned are as,

dog - 1.5 billion

dog training - 230 million

dog training classes - 9 million

Another thing to note is that capitalisation is not considered when doing a Google search.

dog, DOG & DoG will return basically the same results.

Other thing is using operators to modify your search.

Using quotes (""):

When you enclose some words inside quotes, it will do a search for pages with all words appearing together in order given, or in other words it will do a phrase search.

Next is using hyphen or dash (-):

When hyphen is used just in front of a word, that word will be excluded from the search pages. That is the pages that contains the specific word will be excluded from the results.

dog training classes -puppy

'site' operator

Site operator helps us to restrict the search to a particular web site. There should be no space between the 'site:' operator & the domain name.
transfer site:health.gov.lk

'filetype' operator
Filetype operator restricts the search to be returned from a specified file type.
six thinking hats filetype:ppt

Even though there are many more operators, knowing these helps to get most of your queries correctly.

Further Readings: