March 3, 2008

Ever since the Internet arrived, we have had search engines to find information.  Today, with the Internet growing by leaps and bounds, it is ever more important to have search engines to locate the information we are looking for.

The amazing thing is the speed they find what you are looking for.  You can type in your query and within just a few seconds, you have thousands of related items to look at.

The thing you want is for the search to find items closest to what you want so you don't have to search through the results in order to find what you are looking for.  Since there are a lot of different search engines out there, and Google seems to be the most popular, I will explain how to do advanced searches in Google.  Other search engines are similar.

The trick is to do an advanced search to narrow down the number of items it finds, and only show the pertinent items you want.  Until recently, you had to type in the proper syntax.  Now, all you have to do is click on Advanced Search.

That will bring you to the screen below.

Maybe you only want to search a particular site.  In this case, go to the Domain section and type in the domain, example mauihelpdeskcom.  When it searches for what you put in the Find results area, it will only search the domain you typed.

As you can see, there is a lot of criteria you can enter, which will narrow down the search to exactly what it is you want.  This way, you won't have to go through thousands of items trying to find your desired item.