How to refine your internet search results

Finding the information you need can be one of the most frustrating parts of using the web. The vast number of web pages available means that unless you know exactly where you are going, you are at the mercy of search engines such as Google, Bing and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines are easier to use now than when they first appeared in the 1990s, but there is still a knack to getting the best out of them. In this article we will give you some expert hints and tips on how to quickly home in on the results you want.

That way, you will waste less time searching and more time enjoying all that the internet has to offer. Note that throughout this article, terms in bold are the exact words and phrases we typed in, including symbols and punctuation.

Tell it what you need
Try a simple experiment: imagine you are trying to find out how long Emperor penguins live. Open your favourite browser and your usual search engine and type in penguin. On Google we found 43.4 million results, on Bing 26.8 million, and on Ask Jeeves 4.9 million. None of the links on the first page of results gave us a reliable result. The top link on all three sites was Penguin Books.

Now search again using the phrase Emperor penguin longevity. On Google that reduced the number of results to 19,900, on Bing to 77,200 and on Ask Jeeves to 35,200. The top result on all except Bing pointed to a page at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology, which has the answer, 19.9 years on average, halfway down the page.

This link was second from top in Bing. It’s a simplistic example but the fact is that the more information you give a search engine, the more likely you are to get a useful answer.

Constructing good searches is more important than your choice of search engine. But that doesn’t mean they are all identical; they all offer different tools. For example, Bing lets you preview a snippet of the website for any link in the results page, which can be a great time saver.

Ask Jeeves understands questions such as ‘What is the longevity of Emperor penguins?’, while video search results in Bing have live preview thumbnails that are much more useful than Google’s equivalent.

The best way to find these featuresis to give them a try. You might find that a different site suits your style of searching better. Whichever site your use, though, here are our top 10 tips for better search results.