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an answer for me probably included the phrase "Internet Explorer won't start" in his or her article. (Here's another tip: Google is so friendly, that it will even put the closing quote on for you, so you only have to put a quote at the beginning of your search phrase.)

Another way to narrow down your search results and make them more relevant is to include more search words. Instead of putting The Cars in quotes, we might have added another term, or two, or more - again, think about what words would be likely to appear on a page about whatever you're looking for. So I might add the name of the lead singer to my search and enter "cars ocasek" (without the quotes, this time); again, the first few results are directly related to the band The Cars, although they are different from the results I got with the last search. By the way, you can mix and match these techniques, piling up terms and phrases, like this: cars "my best friend's girlfriend".

There are dozens of more complex ways to fine-tune your Google searches: you can use "or" to search for pages including one term or another (e.g. "cars OR blondie" will return all pages that include either word), you can use various wild cards to replace words in phrases (e.g. "she's my * girlfriend" will return pages with "she's my best friend's girlfriend" but also "she's my favorite girlfriend" or "she's my neighbor but I wish she was my girlfriend" and so on), you can use the minus sign to exclude words from your results, and on and on. Google is a powerful computing tool, and it's possible to build search strings that look like formulas from a theoretical physics textbook. But for almost all of the things we look for on a day-to-day basis, the techniques above, combined with a little bit of savvy about what the page you're looking for is likely to include, will bring you exactly what you're looking for.

Learn more about this author, Dustin Wax.
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