How-to: Using Search Engines

Searching on Search Engines: If you are not a technologically savvy person of if you think that your skill level is that of an elementary school child, you are definitely not alone. The purpose of this article is to provide you with some how-to tips on searching on the internet that, I hope, will help you search the internet better. I will keep this guide easy to understand and give you only key information to help you use search engines more effectively. I will stray away from the nitty-gritty information because there are many articles out there that already explain search engines in greater detail.

Search Engine: All search engines provide the same service. But they all use entirely different algorithms that presents different search results. So, it really doesn’t matter exactly what search engine you use, but Google, so far, has one of the better/faster search engines that indexes (a term used to describe how many websites/pages a search engine has ‘crawled’) much of what is out there on the world wide web. Most web-designers optimize their web-pages specifically for Google, which helps people like you and me find one website among a couple hundred-million.

Search Terms: Keywords: mustang, blue, car, 1969, depending on the order and phrasing will result in different search results. If a website called “Greg’s Mustang Blog” writes “Welcome to Greg’s Mustang Blog: My mustang, which is blue, is my favorite antique car because of the 1969s muscle engine”, Greg’s blog might be very well ranked because of the relevancy of keywords used as well as the order it was phrased. Alternatively, Bob’s Car Review writes, “Car Reviews: 1969 Mustang (shown here in blue)” might be very poorly ranked because the order of the words and context of the words are not favorable to the search engine.

The way your search terms displays will vary depending on the keywords you type into the search engine. By adding distinctive words that would better describe what you are looking for, the search engine will filter and display a search result that it believes you are looking for. This is probably the most difficult part to explain, but I’ll try to give you examples of different strategies you could use.

Very Specific keywords are usually terms that offers specific criteria like model numbers and “people in the know”. Search results will yield very be limited, but a search engine will filter out most websites that will not have anything to do with what you are looking for. (i.e. ‘Panasonic TC-32LX85′, ‘microsoft error: This device is not configured correctly. (Code 1)’)
Somewhat specific are keywords that might have broad search results, but still somewhat specific to a particular subject. (i.e. Wii games, college football scores, ‘how to cook a turkey’)
Not Specific keywords are usually single words that could be very broad. (i.e. furniture, basketball, poker)

Search engine algorithms often rank websites on how the keywords are phrased, how the pages are structured, and how other web pages refer to the website. Ultimately, choosing the right keywords is like choosing the right ingredients for a recipe. If you know the right words to use the better the chances you will have finding the right website.

Search Results: Now depending on how specific your search term is, you can use quotations (”) to be specific to a phrase like in my ‘very specific’ example. When the results show, you will have to filter through pages (sometimes a search engine result can yield 830,000,000 page results like searching a non-specific term like ‘Microsoft’) but every search result will show you the title of the web page, the URL of the page, a brief summary of the page, and advertisements. Here are a few thing you should look for:

Identify the URL of the page: If you are looking for specific product, team, or personal information, the official website would be the best thing to look at first because many sales channels do not have ‘up-to-date’ information. However, their are reputable websites out there that devote resources to bring the latest information.
Date Created: try and read information that is the most current.
Getting a feel for a website’s objective. What is the purpose of the website? Is it trying to sell you something? Is it a “fanatic’s” website, or is it data heavy.
Advertisement: If you are looking for something to buy, it might be worth while to visit one of the site that helped sponsored the search engine. Otherwise, you should use the natural search results for more relevant information.

Caution: Deception is the Internets’ best marketing technique. Some websites try and lure you into their website because companies pay big bucks if you have a well trafficked website. People use techniques that would trick search engines into placing them among the legitimate websites. Things to look out for when you are reviewing the results:

Look at the URL for the website. If it looks funny and has a lot of random words that doesn’t have anything to do with the site, skip it.
No such thing as a free lunch. If a site claims to give you anything for free (or heavily discounted), be skeptical.
First impression. If the site looks like it was put together in a matter of days, then you might want to rethink your visit. Try more reputable websites first like Amazon or eBay.

There is plenty more information out there that would go into much more depth than I could ever. However, this article gives you a simply detailed picture of how people use search engines as a marketing tool and how people use search engines to find out more information.

Here is a quick list of good references if you are interested in Search Engines: Wikipedia, seomoz.org, or search ’search engine optimization.” Also, feel free to comment with questions and I’ll try my best to answer your question from my experience.

Good Luck!