Narrow Your Search Results

Have you ever stopped to look at the number of web pages a search engine finds for you?  Just for an example, I did a Google search for "computer supply stores" and had 117 million results.  How would someone find a specific result out of so many pages?

Fortunately, there are ways to narrow your search.  (For the computer store example, adding a location or a state would be a great start!)  However, if you have run out of terms to add, here are a few more ways to help you find the right page.  (All of these work on Google, but most of them will work on any search site.)

1) Quote It - If you are looking for a specific phrase, add quotation marks around it to find only sites with that phrase.  (Otherwise, a site with those words anywhere on the page is included.)  If you can't remember a word or words from the phrase, add the quotes and then put an asterisk in place of the words you don't remember.

2) Remove It - If you are finding results in the wrong category (like you want pictures of the animal jaguar and you are only finding pictures of the car), adding a "-" before a word will eliminate any pages with that word.  Searching for "jaguar -car" will return pages that have the word jaguar but not the word car.

3) Range Search - Adding two periods ("..") between two numbers will search for numbers that come in that range.  If you need a computer that is between $500 and $750, searching computer $500..$750 will return results in that price range.

4) Or - If you have multiple search terms and want all the pages that only include one of them, separate them with "OR" in capital letters.

5) Site Specific - If you know your result is on a specific site or you only want to search a specific site, add "site:" followed by the domain name of the site.  For example, "site:microsoft.com" will only return results from Microsoft's site.

6) Related Sites - If you don't necessarily need results from a specific site, but you want results from that site or other similar sites, add "related:" followed by the domain name.