Searching the Internet using Google

Google is currently the most popular search engine, so popular that it has given rise to the verb ‘to google’. There are other search engines competing with Google as it can be very lucrative in terms of advertising revenue if they build their brand name.

From the www.netmarketshare.com, here are market share for Google and other popular search engines…

Desktop Search Engine Market Share – May 2015

Improving your Searches

In today’s world, more and more things are done online. Even if you don’t consider yourself a computer person, you now need computer skills in order to conduct research, shop online, keep in touch with family, and more.

The ability to search for information online is one of the most important information literacy skills you can possess. By improving your search skills, you can find what you’re looking for more quickly, without having to sift through tons of irrelevant results.

As you gain experience with search engines, you’ll be able to conduct better and better searches, which means it will become quicker and easier to find what you are looking for. Here are a few tips for improving your searches:

As you’re typing your search terms, the search engine will try to guess what you’re searching for and it will show a list of search suggestions. These can give you ideas for search terms that you may not have thought of.

  • Search phrases. Put quotes around a phrase so each word in the phrase isn’t searched for separately. For example, if you put quotes around “diabetic biscuits”, the search engine searches for that entire phrase in a webpage. But if you simply type diabetic biscuits, the search engine searches for each of the words individually where both words appear anywhere in article.
  • Exclude words. Use a hyphen (-) at the beginning of a word to exclude search results containing it. For example, macaroni -cheese. Note that there is a space before the hyphen, but not after it. In many search engines the word NOT (in all caps) is used, as in macaroni NOT cheese.
  • Use OR. You can use OR (all caps) to include either of two search words. For example, soup recipe tofu OR fish should return recipes for soup that contain tofu or fish (or both). You could also search for soup recipe tofu OR fish OR chicken OR beef.

See more at:

http://www.gcflearnfree.org/searchbetter/google-search-tips