Helpful Suggestions to Make Online Searches Using Google More Productive

Search engines consist of Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, Lycos, AltaVista, and Dogpile [which does fetches instead of searches], but the leading search engine is Google. 70% of consumers first search Google. So It might be of help to you to provide some basic search hints on Google.
There are 3 types of tools to help center your search: Helpful Characters, Operators, and Field Search Commands.

Helpful Characters - Helpful to targeting a search. A few examples are:
" " Quotation Marks - helps you group a phrase such as "regional sales manager" without the implied AND between each word.
( )Parentheses - helps to designate a subset. Remember the example above of (peanut butter). This is also very useful for complex searches such as dentist AND (Franklin OR Spring Hill OR Brentwood).
- This is the dash and the Google indicator for NOT. If you want dogs but not cats you type dogs -cats.
~ This is the symbol for synonyms and is located on your keyboard to the left of the 1 key capitalized. An example is ~auto which will return searches for auto, car, truck, etc.


Operators- These are words that facilitates focus, confine, or exclude certain terms. If you use them they must be in all capital letters. A few examples of Operators are:
AND - Google assumes you put AND between words so if your search is peanut butter and jelly Google will assume you are looking for sites with peanut and butter and jelly. If you enter it as (peanut butter) AND jelly you will get the grouping. The parenthesis is another hint to aid in clarifying searches.
OR - Use OR if you want to find joined words. An example might be dogs OR cats which would return results for either dogs or cats serving up more results than dogs AND cats which would have to include both.

Field Search Commands - Beneficial when you get an initial search but want to refine. If you use these they must be in lower case letters and include a colon. A few examples are:
Related: - You notice one result in your search that fits your need the most and want to see others like this. You type related: and paste the URL (address) of the site. So it would look like related: website.com.
Site: - You want to search within a specific site. Say you are looking for info on your printer on the Hewlett Packard webpage but don't want to go through all their search steps. You could type myprintermodel site: www.hp.com. This would provide you pages in the HP site.

Finally on all Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) you will find a link for Advanced Search just to the right of the Search button. This takes you to a form which points you through your search criteria and automatically inserts the correct format. Google's search algorithm is very complex and secret. They constantly strive to anticipate what you're really trying to find but if you give them a little help, it should increase your search quality and reduce your search time. Good searching.