Simple Tips to Improve your Searching
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
Use the power of the search engine.
Don't scroll endlessly through page after page of weak search results, continue to change your search conditions and look at only the first page or two.
Think synonyms.
Before you begin searching, think of every synonym you can regarding your search. Priortize them and then search. Buy a good synonym dictionary, or use Thesaurus.com
When you hit a wall, switch contexts.
Spend only a few minutes searching for your words. When nothing comes up, take a completely different approach.
Some ideas for context switches:
Think of who uses what you are looking for and search for the people or companies who are users. Once you find a user, search their web page, or send them an email.
Search for people or organizations who supply the raw materials for what you need.
Search for government agencies who might have something to do with what you want.