Clever search makes the search exactly more useful
05/09/2011
Google search is quick and easy to use in its most basic form. And this is fine for most types of search. But with autofills and personalised search becoming more prevalent you do not always want the suggested autofilled search.
Retyping what you are actually after gives reason. n to consider just what you want. And may you want search exactly as is. This is actually easy to do using the search exactly as is (+) operator. So +keyword will give search results based just on the keyword and not on any synonyms.
Other operators are useful, such as the OR can be useful if you are not too sure what you are searching on. For example henry [vii or viii] will give information about two kings.
But if the results are still not right, then another approach is to look at alternative keywords in the ‘something different’ links, usually located in the left column. These are alternative queries and some of these might give better results. Once you have looked at these, you can refined these more using the search exactly(+) or other parameters. The opposite to the ‘search exactly’ is the exclude(-) parameter and this excludes results with a particular phrase.
The numbers of real people using these extra search parameter is small, but investigating how they work gives a useful insight to how the search engines are changing and is a very useful if not essential part of SEO research. Effective SEO work will always consider changes in the Google search product functionality.
