Find Anything Online: 8 Search Engine Tips

What search engine do you use? Google? Yahoo? Bing? AOL? Every search engine can help you find what you’re looking for online. They are designed to search through billions of web results to bring you the results you need. It’s pretty incredible.

Whether you’re researching a company prior to a job interview, snooping around for who to address a cover letter to, trying to find job listings, looking for a networking event near you, Googling yourself, or just trying to find the best cup of coffee in Paris, search engines can help you find what you need. With over a billion websites to sort through, search engines have their work cut out for them, but they tend to do a pretty good job.

Searching is a major part of life. We use search engines to find out just about anything. According to SearchEngineWatch.com, in April 2014, there were 18.6 billion searches. How many of those were yours? Those searches were completed by just a few search engines. Google leads the search engine market with 67.6% of all searches. Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL follow distantly.

Sometimes it’s hard to find exactly what you want when you’re searching. How do you fine tune your Internet search? There are a few Internet search tips and tricks that can help bring the best results to the top of the search rankings. Are you ready to learn a few Internet search tips?

1. Find Exact Phrases: Use “” around words
   • Example: “George Clooney”
2. Search A Specific Site: Use site:
   • Example: site:JobMonkey.com Cool Jobs
3. Exclude Terms: Use –
   • Example: Ski Resorts -Vail
4. Find Related Words or Sites: Use ~ or related:
   • Example: ~university
5. Find Results By File Type: Use filetype:
   • Example:  filetype:.pdf
6. Replace Common Terms With Wildcards: Use *
   • Example: *robin
7. Define Words: Use define:
   • Example: define:huckleberry
8. Do Math Calculations: Use +, -, *, /, or ()
   • Example: (2+4)/(4*6)-2

Let’s look at a bigger example. Say you want to search JobMonkey for nursing job salaries in Fort Worth, Texas, but not Dallas. You might search for: nurse salary site:jobmonkey.com “fort worth, texas” -dallas.

This search would return results from JobMonkey.com for nurse salaries, but would only return sites with the phrase Fort Worth, Texas and not the term dallas. As you can see you can mix and match to ultimately find exactly what you need.

There are plenty of other search engine tips that will help you find what you are looking for. There are specific ways to search authors, track packages, check weather, convert units, get movie times, find times in different places, search with zip codes, using autocomplete forms, and so much more. Mix, match, and combine these internet search skills to hone your Internet researching for job searching and for fun. You may also want to explore a few sweet keyboard shortcuts on your computer that can make your life easier.

You’ll be amazed what you can find when you know how to make the most out of Google and other search engines. Search engines incredible tools. Like any tool, when you know how to use it, the results can be outstanding. Use these search engine tips and take your Internet searching to the next level.