Advanced Searching Techniques - Easy as Pie

When you walk into the bakery and request an item, do you say, “Just give me a pie”? Or do you say “I’ll have the homemade apple pie” while pointing to it? Of course we do the latter. Searching is just that easy. Coming up with the specific search phrase isn’t always that easy, but the concept remains the same. Broad searches get you all the pies. Specific searches get you the pie you really want.

So how do we do a specific search? Think completely through your objective before asking. Most people just go to a search engine and type in without forming a plan of attack. So how do we plan?

Let’s say you want to search for the recipe of a bread that was baked during Egyptian mummification burial ceremonies. If you go to a search engine and type in “recipe”, you are given millions of possible pages where your recipe could be. Have fun!

There are a number of ways to potentially narrow this down. First, we could type in the whole phrase I used above, “bread that was baked during Egyptian mummification burial ceremonies”. Now we get nothing that resembles what we are looking for. (Maybe your search brought up this page!) Now our search is too specific. Of course I picked this example on purpose. Normally this technique will work with some tweaking. In this case I was too specific on a very weird topic.

This is where we discover specialty sites. Instead of a precise search on what we want, let’s step back a bit and look instead for a site that has recipes from Egypt. If we search for “Egyptian recipes”, we might find a great web site with loads of recipes from Egypt. Once we’ve discovered this site, we can then go to this site and see if they have any ancient bread recipes used when there were mummies. Still didn’t find it? Perhaps this site only has modern recipes. Let’s go back to the big search engine and now search for “historical Egyptian recipes” or “ancient Egyptian recipes”. Now we might just find the site that has our recipe.

By breaking up our search into two pieces and having a plan of attack, we stand a better chance at locating what we are looking for. Next we are going to cover more advanced techniques including a funny thing called a Boolean. Have your subscribed to our newsletter? Make certain you do so you don’t miss out as we add articles!