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How To Do Better Internet Searches

Earlier we learned how to search using Google. However, sometimes you have a more specific need that might be better served by a specialized search engine. There are dozens and dozens of search engines specially designed for just about any task that you can think of. Half of the battle when looking for content on the web is knowing where to go to look

General Information - Wikipedia - The world’s largest community generated encyclopedia, and a great first stop.

Photos - Flickr - Millions of photos, many of which are publicly licensed for reuse.

Videos - YouTube - Everyone’s favorite source for user submitted videos.

People - Spock - Whether you are looking for more information about Hulk Hogan or your next door neighbor, chances are you’ll be able to find something here.

HowTos - WikiHow - A community driven How To Site.

Music - Last.fm - A huge index of music, discover new tracks or share some of yours with the
community.

Medical - PubMed - A government maintained directory of medical publications.

Business - LexisNexis - A great source of legal documents, business information and public records.

Shopping - NextTag - Find the cheapest prices with this comparison shopping service.

There are a world of other options for finding information on the web. All you have to do is search for them, good luck.

More Search Tips

“In Google, use the asterisk (*) to find your terms separated by one or more terms but close to one another. There is no information in the help files on the maximum separation. Increasing the number of asterisks is not supposed to make a difference but it does and it appears that one asterisk stands in for one word.” — RBA

“Google Image search results show you instead of tell you about a word. Don’t know what jicama looks like? Not sure if the person named “Priti” who you’re emailing with is a woman or a man? Spanish rusty and you forgot what “corazon” is? Pop your term into Google Image Search (or type image jicama into the regular search box) to see what your term’s about.” –Lifehacker

“‘Phone Listing: Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is. If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.

Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).” — Hubspot

More Reading

List Of Search Engines
Choosing A Search Engine
Types Of Search Engines

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