My “Day I Left Pennsylvania” led me to some archived website posts (before blogs were invented) I had written many years ago. I’m re-posting them now. Bear in mind that most of the content in this series is over 5 years old. I have left the content more or less intact. I have removed some links and added some others — but that’s it. Enjoy!

Being able to find information effectively has become a lot easier since Google has improved their search engines, but there was once a time when you had to use crazy pedantics to find stuff you wanted. Some of the techniques still apply.

Syntax

Syntax is not what you pay when you buy cigarettes, alcohol, or pornography. Syntax is, in layman’s terms, the grammar you use to communicate with the google search engine (in this instance.) This will look a little complicated, but I’ll explain it all, bit by bit.

<modifiers><term 1> <modifiers><term 2>…

Modifiers

What are modifiers? Modifiers, or “qualifiers” are represented by punctuation symbols, but they tell the Google search engine to interpret the following term in a certain way.
For example the quotation marks [" "] are used to tell google that you want the enclosed term to be verbatim. Entering dog pile would find pages that matched ‘dog’ OR ‘pile’. Entering “dog pile” would result in pages that only matched ‘dog pile’. It basically forces the search engine to treat multiple words as one solid term.

The following basic modifiers can be used

+ : The plus sign (AND), used directly before a term, tells the search engine that the term is a required term. If you use the plus sign, you are guaranteed to have that term in every one of your pages. This can turn 1,053,245 results into just 1,453. It would be used like this:

+Transformers Cartoon Movie
That tells google “I want you to find me all the pages that contain Transformers Cartoon stuff or Movie stuff.” You could also get slick like:

+”Britney Spears” +implants
These terms say to google: “Find me all sites about britney spears and implants.” Note that without the quotation marks, the search would yield different results.
- : The minus sign (NOT), used directly before a term, tells the search engine that the term is an unwanted term. If you use the minus sign, you are guaranteed that the term will not appear on any of the pages. For example:

+Hilton -Paris -Hotel
This says “Find me all pages about Hilton that are not about Paris Hilton, or the Hilton Hotels.” That search could be used to find info about Nicky Hilton (Paris’ sister), but it would be more efficient to just write:

+”Nicky Hilton” -Paris
This says “show me all pages about Nicky Hilton ALONE, without Paris”. Which would NOT give you sites that included both of them.

Applications: The purpose of modifiers is to refine your searches. Let’s say you want to know all there is to know about the history of the Italian game of Bocce Ball. You could start here:
Bocce Ball (42,800 hits)

but you should probably make sure that other “ball” words don’t come up (“ball point pen” “soccer ball” “ball room dancing”) So let’s put it in quotations:
“Bocce Ball” (28,000 hits)

There we go! Now we’re getting somewhere. Ok, now we want to know the history of it, so we’ll search for this:
+”Bocce Ball” +history (3,680 hits)

A bit better. Still, 3,700 pages would take an awful long time to go through. Generally speaking, you could probably stop refining and start looking through the top 10 results, but let’s see if we can get our results down into the hundreds. So now what we do is start the exclusion process. Look at some of the pages that are showing up. The word “shop” shows up, but we aren’t interested in buying. So let’s exclude that:
+”Bocce Ball” +history -shop (2,280 hits)

We’re getting there. Now we need to be a bit more specific. We want to know the ITALIAN roots of the game. But from the looks of it, we haven’t seen any sites that are ONLY about the history of it. So if we went on an excluding rampage, we’d probably cut out some good info. We just want to trim the fat a little bit, so we’ll be more specific:
+”Bocce Ball” +history +Italy -shop (337 hits)

Bingo! We’re down into the hundreds. Now let me again stress that the top 10 results are usually the results you want, and they probably won’t change too much, even through all this exclusion. Regardless though, we narrowed our search results from nearly 43,000 hits down to just over 300! That’s not even 0.7%! And all of the detailing was done solely through just viewing the search result titles, we didn’t have to go to any one of those pages.

Real information digging is about more than just getting efficient web searches, it’s about data collecting and absorption.

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