Tips for using the Google (or other) Internet search service

Google and other Internet search engines offer many options to make it easier to find the information that you are searching for.   The list of links and examples of special search features below was compiled and tested in 2006 - I expect that some of these options may evolve or disappear over time so keep that in mind if you try them and they no longer work OR if they now return new/enhanced/optimized results.  Also, spaces can make a big difference in the results that you get - try your search with and without spaces when using the special features shown below.

In general you can refine your searches by surrounding your search terms with quotation marks, i.e.:

      Use:    "dale reagan"   instead of:    dale  reagan   

Add one more search term and the results narrow quite a bit:

     Use:    "dale reagan" savannah  

In general, when looking for goods and services on the Internet I find that I get the most relevant results when I include three items in a search:

1. a concept term with perhaps a sub-term (i.e. classical guitar instead of just guitar)

2. a location relevant to the concept OR relevant to my needs 

3. a second location term (state or county, try with abbreviations AND with complete spelling)

Note that a new window will be opened for each of the links below that you select.  Using the examples below you will find that order of search terms does lead to some differences in the results.   I suggest you try reversing your search term word order if the first order does not provide what you are looking for:

• Search for:  photography savannah                savannah photography (reversed search term order)

• Search for:  photography savannah georgia     

• Search for:  photography savannah ga

You can also combine some of the above to further refine your searches, i.e.:

    site:dalereagan.com    intitle:photo

What do you do when the search results are 'off' a bit?  Why does this occur?

There are a number of reason for this including:

1. the search engine being used is limited in some way (i.e. it is specialized for certain types or information); solution/approach: use a different search engine...

2. the results are influenced by webmasters and marketers who apply SEO (search engine optimization) or SEM (search engine marketing) tactics that are misleading (i.e. your results contain bogus sites or simply SPAM web sites that contain no real content - just links to other sites...)  Most search engines provide you with means to reports such sites - reporting SPAM web sites helps everyone.

3. the information is 'old' - the search engine has not made a recent visit to sites with more recent information;  solution/approach: use more than one search engine.

To improve the quality of your search results you can expand or shrink your search terms them - in general three to five search terms will provide better (a narrower set of links) results.

What about searching for digital images/photographs/pictures?  

The relevance of your results using a general search engine will vary quite a bit.   Again, the best approach is to include three to five terms.  The indexing of images depends upon more factors than text so it is actually a bit more complex.  Some search engines seem to favor the use of external image-related sites so the results that you get can be limited (and in some cases, the relevance of the images may actually be improved since image-related sites tend to provide additional indexing keywords.)  Caution: you may wind up with un-expected and inappropriate results in your image search...

For photographs on this site I have attempted to provide additional photograph/image/picture information by creating a thumbnail index page - this was done by extracting meta-data from the images and then generating simple web pages with the image and it's information.  Try the site search (below- click on button for this domain) to see sample results.  Of course the results have a high relevance based on the locations where the images were created:  Alaska, Georgia, California, Nevada, Colorado, Savannah, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dutch Harbor, Estes Park and Boulder.  There are a number of terms that will result in quite a number of 'hits' as well as terms with just a few 'hits'.  Some search terms to try (remember, use three to five terms to narrow your results):

Some thoughts on Evaluating Search Engines based on search results are found here..

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