Search parameters are the way in which we search for info on the Internet. They control what search sites shows us according to the way we structure words and symbols in our search queries. And among all of the different search engines, Google is quite arguably the one where most individuals go to when it comes to searching for content. Google also happens to be the one which offers more customising options for our searches. And regardless of whether most of the time people just perform a basic search, it is still good to understand which search parameters Google offers for those instances when a regular search is not enough.
Here are some of the most important ones:
Phrase search: Usually, the moment you introduce more than one word into Google’s search box, the search site is smart enough to show you the most relevant results relating to that search. Nevertheless for those instances when you need unreserved precision, all that you need to do is wrap your search phrase with double quotes (“your search phrase”) and Google will give you occurrences of the term you searched for, precisely how you searched for it. There is a risk though, that you could miss fantasically valid results by searching this way. Misspellings and middle names are common examples of this.
Exclude terms: If you can customise your search questions to include only the precise term searched for, then most surely you can exclude terms from searches just as easily. To do hence all that you need to do is add a minus sign (-) right before the word you need to exclude. As an example, if you search for football football, Google will exclude the terms football from its results. You can use this parameter as many times as you need in one single search, just be sure to include a space before each and every minus when looking, otherwise it won't work.
Fill on the blanks: This Google parameter may be considered the “wildcard” of searching. It is symbolised by an asterisk (*) and it will tell Google to use that space as a placeholder for unknown words and offer the best matches it popped up with. As an example, the term vegetarian soy *, will return results related to vegetarian soy recipes, vegetarian soy products, amongst others. You have got to consider though, this parameter can only be utilized for words and not for parts of words.
One OR the other: Like in math and logic, Google uses the parameter OR (typed in higher case) to segregate the results depending on where the word is located. So , if you type bars OR cafes in California, Google will display results of either bars or cafeterias in California, dependent on which it considers more relevant. By the way, the operator AND also exists, but it is the default used by Google in case you don’t include OR, so there isn't any need for you to really include it in your searches.
Of course, as with any set of rules and parameters, Google also considers some exceptions to its rules. For instance, words that are considered by Google to be “stop words”, like “the”,”a” and “for” will be often ignored unless it considers them important, like when looking for the music band The Cure. Punctuation signs, which are generally ignored, become an exception when it comes to some particular terms, like the + sign when searching for C++ (a coding language) and other similar ones.
To summarise, whether or not most of the searches we conduct online are standard, there exist a collection of values or parameters that will gives us a lot more control for those eventualities in which we need them. Besides, knowing these rules and exceptions can also help us avoid errors when naming or optimizing our personal or business websites.
PROBLEM: If the website dropped out of Google’s top 1000 results, then I am willing to bet that in nearly every situation of this type, the webmaster had done something wrong in the last few years, and Google has just now caught on to this infraction.
As an example, years ago, website link harvesting have been used by site owners and also approved simply by Yahoo. Next Yahoo begun to take into account website link harvesting being “bad local communities.Inches
Link farms are the kind of thing that can be easily recognized by human and search engine alike. So, the link farms were tagged as “bad neighborhoods” and their values were discounted to zero, and the websites linked from link farms got a minus points for their participation in the link farms.
It was a bad practice that the webmaster had participated, and Google finally got around to penalizing the websites whose rankings were supported by these shaky foundations.
John has over 40 years of experience in business promoting sales engineering general management online real-estate planning, for the past 20 years John has been a active Meditation Student. He has worked for and with worldwide corporations such as IBM, Electronic Data Systems and Mahindra British Telecomm. He has a BS from Brown in Computer Science an MA through IBM in Industrial Electronics, he also has a PhD in International Trade and Management from the London School of Business and Trade.