Remove Lady Gaga from Google And Other Search Tips
Search Better!
It can be very frustrating to click through page after page of results on Google to to find the result you were searching for.
Contrary to belief of many “non-geek” types the issue is not with Googles result but rather with how we search for them. A lot of us search for just one word when we search, I know I do, and the differences between searching for “car”, “honda”, “red car” and “red honda civic” are substantive.
If you tried searching Google for the terms above I’m sure you’ve already figured out that the more descriptive you are the better the results will be, but being descriptive is not the “end all and be all” of efficient searching.
Google (and most other search engines) accept a lot of search commands, or operators, which you can employ to further narrow the results.
For example, earlier today Sara was searching for “romance” while researching material for Everyday Love Stories. Much to her chagrin she kept getting results involving Lady Gaga, so I suggested using the “minus” operator to remove Lady Gaga from the results (now if only that would work from the air waves).
romance -”lady gaga”
There are a lot of operators which work on most of the major search engines such as: wildcard (*), OR, phrase search (“phrase”) etc…
If you you want to make your searching more efficient and by extension your day more productive a good place to start is Google Search Basics help page which lists a lot of the operators and explains their usage.
Happy searching.
