Some things are more frustrating than others. Not being able to find something is on the top of the list of the most frustrating things. You know what else is frustrating? Witnessing someone that has no clue how to find stuff… especially on the Internet. People don’t seem to understand the simple concept of syntax. For instance, if you wanted to find out how to cook a steak. What would you write? Would it be:

How do I cook a perfect steak?

I wouldn’t start with that. I tend to take out non-specific words like

a
and
the
is
...etc

So, I’d use something more along these lines:

how cook perfect "medium ribeye"

That is, if I were a buffoon that enjoyed over-cooked ribeyes. Anyways, I’ll remove non-specific words, initially (as they’re occasionally helpful and you’ll figure that out as you explore), and specify important phrases encapsulated in parentheses.

Removing non-specific words will provide you with cleaner search results. The next thing to do is to understand the syntax, introduced above with the parentheses, of the search-engine that you’re working with. I prefer duckduckgo for all my querying needs. I couple that with the ad-blocking of Firefox browser and I’m as happy as a lark, my disdain for ads will be noted in another post.

So, what is this syntax that I speak of? The following will provide you with a better understanding of how to search with more specificity for the results you want. The following is taken from duckduckgo, refer there for more depth, if needed.

Example                 Result
cats dogs               Results about cats or dogs
"cats and dogs"         Results for exact term "cats and dogs."
cats -dogs              Fewer dogs in results
cats +dogs              More dogs in results
cats filetype:pdf       PDFs about cats.
dogs site:example.com   Pages about dogs from example.com
cats -site:example.com  Pages about cats, excluding example.com
intitle:dogs            Page title includes the word "dogs"
inurl:cats              Page url includes the word "cats"

If you’re using duckduckgo you can use a few other syntax tricks such as using \ to go directly to the first search result. For example, \henrysdesk, which sadly doesn’t bring you to my site. 😞 Anyhow, you can also use bangs, which are shortcuts to search on specific sites. For example, !newegg 1tb ssd searches newegg for a 1-Terrabyte SSD. Simple enough, right?

So, I hope that this has been helpful in understanding search engine syntax.

Cheers,

Henry