“X Never Marks the Spot.” Four Search Hacks to Try Today
The last time you searched Google or Bing or Duck-Duck-Go or Amazon for anything was probably less than 20 minutes ago. Maybe you even searched your company’s internal systems for information and it took longer than expected. You may have been searching for something right now which is how you came across this article.
If you, too, still haven’t found what you’re looking for, try the following “hacks” to consistently save search time and retrieve more relevant results.
- Expand your “filter bubble” by NOT saving your search histories. Personalization is useful, but to avoid being shown only results that are based on your past searches, start fresh. Clear your browser cache and cookies.
- Construct a “phrase search.” Surround a string of search terms in quotation marks to instruct the search engine to find those specific terms next to each other. This typically works for phrases up to six words long. Where does it work well? It’s good for finding song lyrics, passages in books, legal documents, or doing a quick plagiarism check.
- Limit the domain types you search with site: and either .edu, .info, .gov, etc. Limiting the domains you search through can increase the relevancy of your results. There has been an expansion of the types of domains in the last several years and you can find a list at the ICANN website.
- Ignore the first page of results and go straight to the second page. Why? The bulk of the first page of results are ads.
Bonus #Protip: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The big internet search engines are good tools, but you can access better, more precise sources at your public libraries or university libraries. Truly, the best hack is to use is the librarian.
