The Complete Guidebook To Web Searching [PDF]

Everybody knows their way around a search engine, right? So you’d think, but the fact is that an incredible amount of people have a very scarce knowledge of internet searching.

These people don’t know how to formulate their queries, instead just ‘asking’ questions to the mighty Google.

These people have no idea how many different content-specific search engines there are, and what you can do with the right bookmarks at your disposal.

For these people – and frankly, for everyone who wants to be more productive and get to know some incredible new search engines – MakeUseOf presents The Guidebook to Internet Searching.

Written by Dean Sherwin, MakeUseOf writer and proud owner of Art of Stinginess, this guide will tell you anything you possibly need – or want to know about search engines.

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Learn how to formulate your searches, limit results by incorporating special search commands, and get to know numerous special search engines. This will be your go-to guide for everything related to searching.

Don’t just stand there waiting, it’s free!

Download The Guidebook to Internet Searching in PDF.

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Simon Slangen

I'm a student from Belgium, absorbing math and science in preparation for my computer sciences studies. I've been writing for MUO for quite some time now, which - because I just love everything regarding technology. Check out my meme? http://meme.yahoo.com/slangen/

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  • Crazy Dave

    Good article, well written and presented…

    although I am disappointed that you didn’t include my favourite search engine… I would be interested to know what you think of http://www.Clusty.com I search there before I go to Google.

    I work in a Library and am sometimes asked by students how to search the internet… I will be taking some of your tips to work with me…

    Many thanks,

    • http://artofstinginess.com Dean Sherwin

      Hey Dave, I recently did an article that featured Clusty here on MUO. Check it out on my authors page.

      - Dean

      • Crazy Dave

        Thanks Dean,

        Great article… going to bookmark the other search engines…

        David:)

  • Mats Svensson

    Sorry for looking a gift horse in the mouth here…

    But PDF?
    Seriously?

    If you have anything to say about the web, publish it as a actual real working web-page.

  • Tari Akpodiete

    Simon, I’m looking forward to checking out this guide. And rest assured, I definitely appreciate that I can download it AS a PDF. Thank you.

  • Keith Krieger

    Nice work. But I will echo Mats observation that exposing this to the search engines by building it as a working and readily searchable web page. While Google does index and spider pdf files, the accessibility of the content diminishes.

    • http://meme.yahoo.com/slangen/ Simon Slangen

      We’ll take the suggestion under consideration for this and future manuals – perhaps both are possible.

      • Tari Akpodiete

        Simon, these people are spouting ridiculous nonsense. They heard something once are are repeating it like parrots. This page describes the PDF that MakeUseOf.com is offering – that was made to help people and is being offered free of charge – so all the search engines/directories will be fully aware that it’s available. Offering this information AS a PDF is ABSOLUTELY the correct thing to do so that people can take it offline and archve and even share it. Web pages do not print well.

        • http://meme.yahoo.com/slangen/ Simon Slangen

          Don’t worry, we would never take down the PDFs :-) The only point worth considering is whether to offer an online/’articled’ version as well.

          - Although I must admit the chances are rather slim. After all, people can already read the manuals online on Scribd.

        • ron

          Thanks for the great collection of search tools and site.

          As to the PDF vs HTML discussion. PDF is admirably suited to maintaining form of document and HTML to searching and updating. Personally, I prefer search and update -ability. I’ve found that web pages tend to disappear, so if they have content, like this, that I like I download them. That way, when I find additional similar content, or things change over time, I can update them myself. And later when I am looking for that “special tip”, I just have to search my hard drive rather than depend on the vagaries of search engine indexing, changing site addresses (invalidating my Bookmarks/Favorites) and disappearing sites to find the tip again.

          Sure there are ways of extracting text/images from PDF’s but that is a lot of effort.

          Pick the format that works best for you, it is your content and site. If you can provide both, so much the better.

  • ron

    Note: I also keep the original link with my downloaded content (HTML or PDF) whenever possible (some PDFs are secured so I can’t add the link) so that I can direct people to the site (gotta keep generating that traffic for you, to “pay” for content”)

  • http://www.rashmi.co.nr Tarun Yadav

    Thanks that helped me.

  • http://trickpedia.com Sid

    Nice ..

  • http://www.websearchguide.ca Gwen Harris

    I appreciate the work that went into compiling this. Thought the collection of specialty engines for people, images, video, and real-time were good – especially as an introduction.

    However, I have a few quibbles with the web search rules.

    The asterisk trick works at Google – not the other engines. At Google you can also use it to force some proximity – eg toyota recalls models for *

    To search at Google for words in the title – use Advanced Search, or the syntax intitle: — must be that form, not In Title. Can also do this at Yahoo and Bing.

    Should make clear that site: – must be lower case. site:toyota.com

    But the most important thing to know about the big search engines today is that they all automatically pick up singular, plural and sometimes word variants. Eg search instructions – will find instruction, instructions, instruct etc. And if you put + in front of that word, you are turning off the extra words – usually not a good thing to do. In the example, toyota +news – at Google, with and without the + is exactly the same. It means you want both words. In this case, Google doesn’t do singular and plural – news is news.

    I cover some of this at my site – websearchguide.ca – and teach it in Mastering Web Searching. A little mastery in the syntax goes a long way to improving search results.

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