by Suzanne Kantra for Techlicious
9 Great Search Shortcuts
Searching the Web for information is a skill. Yes, you can enter a term into a search engine and find information, but that’s the blunt force method. By using a few simple tricks, the scalpel method, you can quickly and easily whittle down your results to get exactly the information you’re looking for.
And if you’re helping your child with search, be sure to turn on safe search as part of your routine for keeping your kids safe online. For Bing and Google, you can find it under the settings button, the cog icon in the upper right corner. Google also has a check-box option to let you lock on SafeSearch.
Here are my favorite ways of approaching search.
1. Finding new stories
In general, putting a year or date in your search term will help limit results to more recent entries and all search engines will surface the most relevant stories based on date. However if you want to limit your results, Bing will let you select results from past 24 hours, past week or past month (Click on the Any time button). Google also lets you search by the past hour, past year or create a custom date range (You’ll see this option when you click on Search Tools).
2. Finding archived stories
If a website has ceased publication or a story is taken down, it is often possible to retrieve information using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. On the site, enter the web address and timeframe and you can browse that website as though it were 2001, for instance.
3. Searching for a specific phrase
When you’re looking for search results for a specific phrase, put your search term in quotes. For example: “Internet privacy.”
This excerpt appears with the permission of Techlicious.
