Web searching made easyWhich? guide to web searching

Find information quickly and easily with our guide to web searching

Google has 87.3% of the web search market in the UK

Sometimes finding that one vital piece of information on the web can feel a little like panning for gold in a river filled with sand.

When it comes to web searching it appears that search engine Google has the Midas touch. It owns 87.3% of the UK’s search market compared with the 4.09 and 3.72% of rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN respectively.

Google owes much of its success to the simplicity of its design. The home page consists of little more than Google’s logo (regularly customised to celebrate topical events) and an empty search box. Often, all it takes is a couple of words typed into Google’s search box and you’ll find what you’re looking for on the first page of search results.

But as the size of the web grows (estimates vary by a few billion here and there), so too does the difficulty of finding accurate, on-target information.

Our advanced search tips will help you find what you’re looking for on the web. Use these and, with a little bit of luck, it won’t be long before you strike gold.

Punctuate your web search

Using standard punctuation in your searches will make them more efficient.

For instance, putting double quotes around a key phrase – “John Smith” for example – restricts results to those where the words appear together. Without the quotes a search would return results such as ‘St John’s, Smith Square’.

If you aren’t sure whether a word has a hyphen in it or not (email or e-mail), keep the hyphen in: Google searches all variations.

Adding a + or - symbol will keep or remove certain words or phrases from search results. So if you want to search for the Egyptian-themed hotel in Las Vegas, type Egypt + “Las Vegas”.

A Boolean search is a way of using the uppercase words OR, AND, AND NOT and NOT when looking for results. On major search engines you can use the + or - and the quote marks we’ve outlined in much the same way.

Major search engines have dedicated image searches

Searching for images and files

Search for images by following the relevant link on your favourite search engine’s home page (alternatively, bookmark Google images, MSN Live images, Yahoo! images or Ask images)

Type in the key words relating to the image you’re after (Albert Einstein, for example). Fine-tune your search through the site’s advanced image search settings link. Google allows you to specify whether you want to show only faces and the size of images you want returned.

You can also specify the types of documents you want to search for. Searching for PDF files or PowerPoint slide presentations is useful if you want to uncover official documents on company websites, such as annual reports.

To do so, follow the options or advanced settings links from your search engine’s homepage. In Google, a quick way to search by file type is to include the word filetype: followed by the three-letter file extension of your desired file, followed by the key words.

Here are some examples of what to type:

• filetype:pdf  Searches PDF files
• filetype:doc  Searches Word documents
• filetype:ppt  Searches PowerPoint files
• filetype:swf  Searches Shockwave Flash files

Remember to include key words in the search query too (for example: filetype:pdf BBC Annual Report).

It’s easy to restrict searches to certain websites. For example, you can look up a computer error code on Microsoft’s website by typing the code followed by site:microsoft.com. This restricts the search engine to trawling for results from Microsoft’s website only.