Searching Techniques (cont.)

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2/ Use the “+” and “-“ operators to specifically include or exclude certain words. For example, if you are still looking for ccna study guides but keep getting sites where you need to register first, you could try this:

“ccna study guides” –register

This tells the search engine to exclude any sites with the word ‘register’ on the page from the results. This is particularly useful for filtering out the endless Amazon clones out there in Internetland. Most sites peddling books will often give the ISBN number of the book. Simply taking that word out of the equation significantly narrows the search and you can string a whole bunch together to keep narrowing the results such as:

“ccna study guides” –register –ISBN

Using the “+” operator in a similar fashion makes sure that a word is definitely included.

3/ If you’re looking for information from a specific type of site, say a University, then you can use the site:edu suffix to your search. For example:

"ccna study guide" site:edu

…will only list sites with a .edu suffix that has the phrase "ccna study guide" in it. Very useful indeed as many educational institutions have a great wealth of online resources for their students. You can do this with all top-level domains such as .com, .co.uk etc. so if you were looking for the same thing, but only on U.K. sites, you could use:

"ccna study guide" site:.co.uk

4/ Set the preferences to return as many results as possible on each page that your search engine allows. The reason I do that is because I generally tend to stop searching after the first two or three pages because I’m impatient and don’t want to click on the ‘next’ button. If the page returns 100 results per page then I’m more likely to scan a lot further than if only 10 were displayed at a time. And you’ll find that most of the good stuff is buried deep in the bowels of the Internet, even with good search terms.

5/ Look for synonyms. Synonyms are words that have the same or a similar meaning to the word in question. So if you were looking for ‘ccna tutorials’ you could consult a thesaurus to find similar meaning words. For example, using the word ‘tutorial’ in a thesaurus gives us the word ‘learning’ and that, in turn, gives us the following words:

information, knowledge, letters, literature, lore, research, scholarship, schooling, science, study, training, tuition, wisdom

Using the thesaurus again lets us drill down even more and gives us further words to work with. For example, using the word ‘training’ from above in a thesaurus gives us:

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The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook

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