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Sometimes, when you're looking for some information on the web, no matter what you type in the search box, you still can't find it. If that happens more often than you'd like to admit, this is the right place for you.
This article is a short tutorial meant to help enhance your search queries in order to obtain more relevant results when searching the web. If you follow these few tips, you will soon see noticeable results.

* THINK BEFORE YOU TYPE *

This should be absolutely obvious and I was thinking about not including it, but it's probably one of the main causes leading to bad and/or malformed queries: you want to get to the information as quickly as possible, so you type in the first thing that comes into your mind. That's a really bad habit because, let's face it, the first thing that comes in our mind is rarely the best, and you should try instead to take just a few seconds to think about what you are really looking for, in order to find the right words for it.

Taking just a few seconds to think about your query can make it better in a variety of ways: after a little bit of practice (following the tips below), it doesn't really take longer than half a second to realize whether a query needs to be made more specific, broader, or if the wording has to change because you realize what you're looking for won't really show up using the words you first thought of.

* AVOID COMMON AND/OR AMBIGUOUS TERMS *

One of the most valuable techniques to improve your search results is to avoid using very common words such as articles, conjunctions, and words or phrases with multiple meaning (if used alone). The best results are obtained balancing two opposite aspects: one the one hand, be as specific as possible and, whenever you can, use expressions that can't possibly be mistaken for something else; on the other hand, though, if a phrase is already so unique that can't possibly be mistaken for something else, that means you've probably typed too much and may need to widen the search a little bit by wiping out the least relevant words.

Here is a very simple example: suppose you're fan of the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, but didn't quite get what "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" is. Now, that's a very long phrase, and you don't need to type it all in the search box - if you do so, you might filter out potentially useful information contained in a page that spelled the phrase in a slightly different way, which can happen quite often.

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