This video is different from videos that show you search engine tips and tricks or videos that take you through the ends and out of how a search engine works.
This video goes to the basics of using a search engine to find the results you want. No matter what techniques you use for your particular search engine, if you don't choose the right terms to enter, you won't get the results you want.
Using a search engine is like using a dictionary. When you think about it, the dictionary is like a manual search engine. You have part of the word you are searching for and you use that part to help you find the rest of the word. Easy, right?
Well, not for some people. Some people are terrible at using the dictionary. They'll say, "If I don't know how to spell the word, how am I suppose to use a dictionary to find out how to spell the word?"
These people are confused because they are lacking knowledge that others have. They weren't taught phonics are kids.
Believe it or not, in some part of the United States phonics isn't required learning and people that don't learn it, don't know how to sound out words to try and guess what letters might make up a word. Not knowing phonics makes using a dictionary almost impossible.
It's the same with using a search engine. Some people are great at using search engines. They are the ones all their friends go to when they need help finding something on the internet.
If you're one of those friends who always needs help, it's not because you're not tech savvy or that your friend is so much smarter, it's because you are lacking the basic knowledge of how a search engine works. Without that information, using a search engine becomes difficult.
A search engine gets its information from programs called spiders. These spiders connect to the internet and start following links. They register all the words on all the websites and then give those words 'weight'.
Weight is the way a search engine gives certain words priority over other words. The most common way a word gets more weight on a webpage is if occurs multiple times on the same page.
When you search for a word, a search engine will list the webpage where the word has the most weight first and then the page with the second most weight and so on.
Different search engines have different other ways that they give words and webpages weight. Some give weight to how many people click the link for the webpage. Some give more weight to the word if the word is included in the page's title or in the page's URL. That's why different search engines give different results.
Regardless of the other methods a search engine uses, nearly all of them give more weight to a word by how many times it occurs on the page.
So, even if you don't know exactly what it is you need search for, if you can think of related words that would be listed on a webpage about what you want to find, you can use that bit of knowledge to find your mystery subject.
Let me give you a real world example. A friend of mine had just seen a trailer for a movie called Nightcrawler. A song played during the trailer that was haunting and tragic sounding. My friend instantly fell in love with the song and had to find it so she came to me for help.
I didn't know the main information of what we were trying to search for. I didn't know the name of the song. I didn't know the artist who sang it. What I did know was the trailer that it appeared in and I also know that spiders don't just visit regular websites. They visit any kind site that is accessible on the internet. That includes facebook sites and forums and blogs and other kinds of social media. If can enter a URL or click a link and get to it, a spider has probably visited.
I also thought that my friend was likely not the only person that was looking for the name of this song. So what I searched for was 'song nightcrawler trailer'. Sure enough, several sites showed up in the results with people asking for the name of the song in the trailer. I clicked on a few and found out that name of the song was "I'd Love to Change the World" and the artist that sang it was 'Jetta'.
I didn't search for 'what is the name of the song in the nightcrawler trailer' because most of the words in that sentence are not normally given weight by search engines because they can occur on just about every webpage and wouldn't help someone narrow down a search. I could have used the word 'name', but in this case, it's a bit repetitive. Anyone talking about a song in a trailer is likely to list the name. Using as few words as possible helps narrow down the results.
That seems relatively easy. I wanted to know the name of the song in the trailer so I searched for the word song and name of the trailer.
Many people who use search engines aren't aware they are so versatile. If they didn't know a song name or the artist who song it, they would think it wasn't possible to find the song.
Now, you know differently and you can be the one your friends come to when they need to find a tricky bit of information.
