Yoda
Creative Commons License photo credit: yapsnaps

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”

We’ve gone search crazy.

There was a time when search was a joke. I vaguely remember the time when going through a Yahoo directory was the way to find what you were looking for. Then Google came along and quickly become the poster boy for an utopian society. Now our society is utterly reliant on Google. People even type in full URLs into Google instead of their address bar. With the Internet becoming increasingly more crowded, how much longer can we rely on the top 10 Google search results to be exactly what we’re looking for? Use these tips to help make your searching more effective.

Better Google Queries

Help yourself out by using better search queries in Google. Wrap phases in quotation marks and use Boolean operators to get more specific results. Google provides a good Web Search Help Center to demonstrate some of these techniques.

Think about your topic, then use an appropriate search engine.

If you want detailed information on well-known subject, such as Madonna’s full name or the four faces on Mount Rushmore, don’t waste time trying to look through the top Google results for the answers, search Wikipedia. Wikipedia is easy to navigate, provides more accurate results than most other resources, and more information is there on the subject that might interest you.

If you want a movie review or an actor’s upcoming movies, search IMDB directly.

Prices for that latest Boba Fett figurine, Amazon or eBay.

Find a good image, Flickr.

The parameters for a Wordpress function, WP Codex.

Craft your own search engine with social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is similar to normal bookmarking with a few benefits. When you bookmark a page, you add tags with terms relating to that page. Your bookmarks are also available to you regardless of which computer you’re on. There are some more aspects to social bookmarking but they are irrelevant to this post.

When you are reading a page that is full of information that you think you might want to eventually come back to, bookmark and tag it in your favorite social bookmarking app such as Del.icio.us. For example, since I am getting into web design I am forever looking for well-designed websites to emulate to some degree. So say I visit a blog that has a nice theme and layout, I tag it with all possible things that I might search for later. I use tags like webdesign, web, design, blog, wordpress, theme, blue, 2col, 2column. So when the time comes for me to design a blue, 2 column Wordpress theme, I don’t go to Google to find that, Google doesn’t know what I consider to be a good theme for that, but Del.ici.ous does.

Yesterday, I tagged a site for a good jquery lightbox tutorial. I have no idea what the URL is and I doubt I could find that site again through Google, but I know where to find it when I need a lightbox photo gallery.

Tools to Make Your Seaching Better.

I probably wouldn’t do most of the steps listed above it wasn’t for some tools that help make it effortless.

Firefox

The Firefox Delicious Bookmarks plugin.
This plugin adds an easy way to tag the page I’m on and gives recommendations for what to tag the page with based off tags others have used to tag the page with. Usually it’s just a few clicks to add my tags and maybe writing out one or two of my own to be more descriptive.

Add Firefox search engines.

Firefox adds a nice little search bar that plugs into various other sites search engines. You can add and remove various search engines depending on what suits you best. With a quick menu drop I can go from searching IMDB for a review of a DVD to Amazon to buy that movie.

Safari

Note: I use Firefox and have not tested these, but the functionality listed on their landing pages looks similar to the firefox tools I use.

Delicious

Delicious Safari

Add more search engines.

Inquisitorx

Acid Search

Internet Explorer

Click here to solve all your problems.

If you’ve got any tools or tips to make our searching better feel free to put them in the comments.