GAUER Family - Subject

	The GAUER Family
	Getting Better Search Results on the Internet

Getting Better Search Results on the Internet
Choose your search words carefully If you want to search for information on The steamship "Augusta Victoria" which sailed from Hamburg in 1891. Choosing hamburg steamship would result in millions of "hits" (supposedly relevant pages) with nothing about your particular ship. Think about what words or concepts are most unique about your search? There are very few Augusta Victorias in the world so that is a good first choice. Adding hamburg to get augusta victoria hamburg would further increase relevance. Adding 1891 would probably restrict the search too much because dates are not found often in web pages, but, it could be useful to further reduce results later. Also watch spelling variations. Hamburg may be spelt (incorrectly) by some web pages as Hamberg. Trying a separate search for augusta victoria hamberg might bring useful results.
Use the + (plus) symbol to force an AND search Many search tools default to an OR search rather than an AND search. This means if you search for "augusta victoria hamburg" you will get millions of hits. Say 2,000,000 pages with augusta mentioned, 30,000 with victoria mentioned and 8,000,000 with hamburg mentioned. The search tools just add all hits together and you would end up with 10,030,000 hits! A better way is to use +augusta +victoria +hamburg as a search. This will result in only web pages that have ALL three words present. (i.e. augusta AND victoria AND hamburg (this is the default behaviour of Google but even then a recent search for these keywords resulted in 30,000 hits!))
Use the " (quote) symbol to group words Even using the "+" symbol you may get 100s or 1000s of hits so the final tip I will give you is to group words using the " (quote) symbol. In our example Augusta Victoria is the name of a ship and we aren't interested in pages that mention Queen Victoria or Augusta, Georgia. Change the search to +"augusta victoria" +hamburg which results in very few and very relevant hits. (A recent Google search of "augusta victoria" hamburg resulted in only 484 hits)
If the above tips don't work Some web search sites may not use the above characters to restriction your search so you will have to look around the search web page you are using for a link to "advanced search" or something like that. In that "advanced search" page there should be information about how to force an AND operation for multiple words and how to group words into "must have" phrases.