Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Blake Barbera has a good entry on his blog about knowing how to use Outlook properly and I followed it up with this post (Please check out Blake’s post on hyperlinking pitches as well - another gem). An article in this month’s Consumer Choice magazine got me thinking that knowing how to use search engines properly is almost as valuable as knowing how to use Outlook properly.

By virtual of my primary degree in Economics and Computer Science, I’m fairly familiar with how search engines work. One of my classmate’s final year projects was on search engines and his presentation about how using multiple terms helps improve results was quite eye-opening.

I’ve noticed that lots of people don’t make the best use out of search engines. For example, they do one word searches or don’t put quotation marks around specific terms they are looking for.

I was really impressed by the article in this month’s Consumer Choice about how to use search engines because there was plenty of stuff covered that I didn’t know about it.

Here’s a quick recap on how to use search engines properly:

• Be specific - If you search for ‘weather’ you get 229,000,000 results. If you search for ‘weather’ in pages from Ireland you get 12,400,000 results. To narrow it down use more keywords, i.e. weather in Ireland Athlone
• Phrase search - Sites like Ask Jeeves give specific reults to queries like What is the capital of Ireland. On regular search engines you can search for specific articles by entering a sentence from the article in inverted commas.
• Images - Click the images option in Google to get a specific link to pictures
• Common words - To ensure common words like a, and, the or it are included in your search put a + directly before it, i.e. +a
• Multiple meaning - Many words have multiple meanings. If you want to focus your search put a - in front of word you want to leave out. For example if you search for stars but are only interested in celebrities, then search for stars -constellations
• Number ranges - you can search for a specific number range by putting two full stops between two numbers, i.e. famous birthdays 1991..2001
• Search security - Google has a function to block results from adult sites by typing safesearch: before your search term, i.e. safesearch:sex
• Broken links - If the Google link doesn’t work, then click the cache sublink to see an old version of the page.

Thanks to Brendan Murray for the great article.