Jason Clarke

This a really simple way to improve your success rate when trying to find something using Google (or any other search engine, for that matter). In fact, it’s so simple that many people already do it, and those of you who don’t may wonder how you got by without this technique. In fact, I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself to use it more often.

When we’re searching for something on the web, and the results from our search query are not at all what we had expected or hoped to see, many of us immediately modify our query to include more or different words. But often the problem with the results that were returned is that they are full of references to material that is appropriate for the words used in the search query, but in an entirely different context. So, sometimes the thing to do is to remove words – not from your query, but from the results set.

Consider a (completely hypothetical) situation where you are searching for information about your house’s windows, but are generating search results with information about the Windows operating system. Rather than trying to find better words for “windows”, why not tell the search engine that you’re not interested in any results that contain the words “Microsoft” or “XP”? It may well turn out that your original search query perfect for the job, once the inappropriate words or phrases had been filtered out.

To exclude words from being included in search results, simply include a minus sign (-) before the terms you want to exclude. So, in the above example, you might search for:

windows information -microsoft -xp

Note that this is only an example, and I expect this particular search query really blows chunks. But you get the point.

Give it a try!