by Dario Borghino

Sometimes, when you're looking for some information on the web, no matter what you type in the search box, you still can't find it. If that happens more often than you'd like to admit, this is the right place for you.

This article is a short tutorial meant to help enhance your search queries in order to obtain more relevant results when searching the web. If you follow these few tips, you will soon see noticeable results.

Think before you type

This should be absolutely obvious and should go without saying, but it's probably one of the main causes leading to bad and/or malformed queries: you want to get to the information as quickly as possible, so you type in the first thing that comes into your mind. That's a really bad habit because, let's face it, the first thing that comes in our mind is hardly ever the best, and you should try instead to take just a few seconds to think about what you are really looking for, in order to find the right words for it.

Taking just a few seconds to think about your query can make it better in a variety of ways: after a little bit of practice (following the tips below), it doesn't really take longer than half a second to realize whether a query needs to be made more specific, broader, or if the wording has to change because you realize what you're looking for won't really show up using the words you first thought of.

Avoid common and/or ambiguous terms

One of the most valuable techniques to improve your search results is to avoid using very common words such as articles, conjunctions, and words or phrases with multiple meaning (if used alone). The best results are obtained balancing two opposite aspects: one the one hand, be as specific as possible and, whenever you can, use expressions that can't possibly be mistaken for something else; on the other hand, though, if a phrase is already so unique that can't possibly be mistaken for something else, that means you've probably typed too much and may need to widen the search a little bit by wiping out the least relevant words.

Here is a very simple example: suppose you're fan of the book The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, but didn't quite get what the answer to life, the universe, and everything is. Now, that's a very long phrase, and you don't need to type it all in the search box -- if you do so, you might filter out potentially useful information contained in a page that spelled the phrase in a slightly different way, which can happen quite often. A better search query (which takes 1/3 of the time to type) would therefore be simply "answer universe everything". So, to sum up: use very specific terms and try to type in as few words as possible.

Get to know your search engine

Getting acquainted with a few simple tricks you can use on your search engine is something you want to look for, because the quality increase is very noticeable in a variety of cases. Here is a few tricks you can use with Google:

site:<domain> <query> searches exclusively in the specified domain.

link:<domain> returns pages linking to a specified domain

define <query> defines a term using online dictionaries. Very fast and useful.

what time is it in <city> returns the local timezone

<num> <source_currency> in <destination_currency> makes currency conversions

<term1> - <term2> returns all results containing <term1> but not <term2>

<"query"> searches for exact string matching

of course, these are just the most common -- Google also acts as a calculator, flight tracker, and countless other things -- you can find much more by searching for "google tricks".

Don't always rely on the first result

If you're using Google, it's good advice in the vast majority of the cases not to use the I'm feeling lucky button, which will take you to the first search term. Unless you're sure of what you're doing, e.g. because you are confident that your query will yield the desired results, it's always better to perform a standard search and very quickly skim through the results and descriptions: these contain extremely useful information from which you can often already tell whether a page contains the results you are looking for. Just look at the context from which the search terms have been extrapolated -- for instance, how close together are the words: if you see too many of these "...", that means the different words are far one from another and therefore probably unrelated.

Why is this search engine so stupid?

Implementing an algorithm that figures out what the page content is about is not a trivial task -- understanding of natural language is one of the greatest challenges in the field of AI, therefore sometimes you may find that just adding or removing words to the query won't help much and feel like you're far from getting the desired results. In that case, be patient, search algorithms based on language understanding as still far from being at a decent stage for now. Just try to reword what you're trying to say -- try to start from the broadest topic and gradually refine, sometimes looking on a Wikipedia article (or just any other article) related to the topic helps finding different words to express the same concept.