Hard To Find

If you want to have Google to help you fill in some information, you can use it in what I refer to as "Game Show Mode". Game show mode is a slight change in context for using Google. Instead of trying to determine exactly what you seek, let google fill in the blank for you to see what IT finds.

In Game Show Mode, you pose a question to Google as if you were a game show host and google will give you "answers" to your question.

So instead of typing:

How many times did edison fail while inventing the lightbulb

Try:

edison failed *

Assuming you have read the other three articles on operations (quotes, plus and minus), you can now focus on combining them into a power cocktail.

If you put a plus in front of a quoted phrase, you are telling the search engine to only include results that contain the phrase. Now if all you are searching for is the phrase, then including the plus is unnecessary, but as soon as you add another word or phrase, you then should add the plus or minus.

Misspellings are common on the Internet. The creators of content will sometimes publish and the search engines will index improper spelled words. Try to think like a child just learning to read and write and spell your key search term a few different ways to see what happens

In your quest to find things that are not easy to find, you can become powerfully more efficient if you learn a few simple searching techniques

Learn the Operations
Quotes, Plus and Minus will do wonders for you searching

• Use quotes for phrase searching
  Use the minus operator to eliminate pages which contain words
  use plus to insure pages must have the word

When searching, you should always be thinking of synonyms for your key search terms and once you run out of search combinations on your primary search term, move on to your list of synonyms.

What is a submarine sandwich in one part of the USA is called a grinder, Italian Sandwich, Hoagie, and probably a few other things in different parts of the country. Irish tin whistle, fedogh, or pennywhistle? All of course. Each different author has a different vocabulary and you need to tap into their set so you can find their content.

Rely first on your own internal thesaurus, but then make sure to consult a real thesaurus such as thesaurus.com.

adding a plus before your search word or phrase tells the search engine that it must have the item in your search results. if you use no operators, you are implicitally giving the search engine permission to include any or all of hte words in your search condition. When you add a plus immediately before a word, you are saying "must have"... the search engine will discard pages without that item.