A Google Lesson^©

by Rennie, 2002

Here are some tips to help you find what you want in Google:

If you put words in quotes, Google will look for the words in that exact order and together.  Let's take an easy example: hammer toe.  If you put

hammer toe

into Google, it will find every single instance of hammer (including carpentry, crafts, etc.) and every single instance of toe.  Let's try that right now and see how many hits we get in Google.  <pause while doing search>  We get 61,300 hits.  Now let's put quotes around it.  We will enter:

"hammer toe"

Ah, much better.  We've limited the search to 2030 hits.  Excellent!  However...

Let's say we are specifically interested in orthotics in relation to hammer toe.  No problem.  We now enter:

"hammer toe" orthotics

Cool!  We are now down to 63 hits!

The thing is, we don't want any sites with any mention of surgery at all so we now enter:

"hammer toe" orthotics -surgery -surgical

The minus signs tells Google to leave out any sites that contain that word.

Wow, look at this.  We are down to 55 sites!

Okay, since I'm never quite happy, I'm going to tweak it one more time.  I reeeeeeally just want to see sites about orthotic shoes for folks with hammer toe.  I enter:

"hammer toe" orthotics -surgery -surgical shoes

Congratulations, you have now taken a search down from 61,300 sites to 33
sites!!!