Having Trouble Finding Something Online?

Having Trouble Finding Something Online?
Then Look Smarter

The last time the experts measured, we learned that we spend 6% of our time online just looking for things. Not impressed? Let’s look at your companies bottom line.

Over an eight-hour workday, that little 6% adds up to 2.5 hours searching a week. With just five employees, you’re talking 13 hours, and if you’re paying them, say, $30 an hour, that’s $390 a week or $20,280 a year. That’s enough to hire someone part time, or outfit a nice break room. Foosball would be nice. (Indeed, another study found that the productivity loss to conduct online research cost businesses $31 billion.)

Allow us to offer you a few tips on retrieving the piece of the web for which you’re looking.

Exact Phrase
You more likely to get where you want faster, if you use an “exact phrase” as your search terms. Example: “automobile” will yield vastly different results than “Toyota Matrix” Use quotation marks, which is common search-engine syntax for “look for that perfectly exact phrase, please.” Many search engines also have a box for “Exact Phrase Match” that you can check, if you have punctuation mark issues.

Implied Boolean
The little brother to full Boolean search terms only requires adding and subtracting. If you want to ensure that a particular word is in the results, use a plus sign (+), such as “DLP” + Cincinnati. If you want your results to exclude a certain term, use a minus sign (-), such as “DLP” – HDTV. For best results, use both. For example, if you wanted to search for the company that writes this newsletter, but not interested in that big company that makes TV sets, the best search term would be “DLP” + Cincinnati –HDTV. (Note the quotes around DLP will ensure that only that word combination is present in your results.)

Full Boolean
Three search terms — “AND,” “NOT” and “OR” — enable you to include or exclude certain terms in what Google gives you. (Most search engines accept so-called “full” Boolean terms.) For example, say you want to get the latest intelligence on laptop battery life. Query for “laptop computer” on Google Search and it yields 108,000,000 results. But “laptop computer AND battery life” pulls up a mere 2,430,000 results. If I slap on “NOT power supply,” I get 1,710,000. Want to get rid of all the Web sites hawking batteries? Just add “OR for sale,” and —bingo — I’m down to less than 1,000,000 results. Oi.

Nesting
There are those moments where you just stare into your search engine’s eyes not knowing what you’re looking for. When that happens, nesting comes to the rescue. Use “nesting” to group together concepts and control the order in which your search is processed. Use parentheses to create nested groups. Connecting the terms celtic and irish with an OR treats these words as similar terms. By putting parentheses around (celtic and irish), these terms now represent one concept which can then be combined with other concepts. In this example, we have combined celtic or irish with myth or religion or folklore by using the AND connector. The search will retrieve items containing at least one word from each of these two concepts

Advanced Terms
Now, if you really want to make their algorithms sweat, many (but not all) search engines allow you to use advanced terms to find the information you’re looking for. Wildcards As example, “#” or “*” symbol can sometimes be used within a word to search for all possible variants — so, for example “wom#n” would search for both “woman” and “women.” And a search for “exhaust*” would pull up results for “exhausted” and “exhaustion” and even “exhaust pipe.” (Some search engines also use “?” instead of “*,” but the result is the same.)

Finally, if you want to search for a term that is close to another, try using “NEAR” or “ADJ” (each search engine handles these terms slightly differently) to find results in which one word is near or adjacent to another.

There. Use the extra time for a longer lunch.

Reprinted with permission from DLP Technologies