I’m still surprised at how some people still type down sentence-long search terms for Google. “Sex” gives you around a billion search results buy say you’re just looking for “sex wax” for your surfboard. Good luck getting the search result you want. You’d probably surf through millions of adult sites and wouldn’t get to anything related to surfboards sans those mature stuff. Anyway, let’s get back to the basics and point out how you can get better search results with the right selection of search words.

Keyword order. You might not consider this but search term order is important. In the old days of yore, you can easily interchange word order and get the same search result but thanks to advances in computational linguistics, keyword order now plays an important part. Try history book and book history. The former will churn out results for books that have history as their focus while the latter will have results about the history of the book.

Using quotation marks. If you still do not know, you can make Google search for pages that show exactly your search terms in that specific instance. Typing in “history of the book” would give you search results specifically about that field/topic. This works quite well for names of people and businesses.

Be aware of stemming. Google pays more attention to root words rather than stems. So if you use farming as your search term, the results would also include results that contain the root farm.

Leave out unnecessary words. Google Search is programmed to leave out very commonly used words such as prepositions and articles. So unless their part of jargon or terminologies, you can leave them out entirely. Words like “the” and “my” “and” and “a” can be omitted from your search term.

Specify things that your don’t want. You can further limit your searches with the use of operators. When searching for products often times you get results from postings on online marketplaces such as eBay. To specify that you don’t want to get results from a particular site, you can use the minus sign (-) operator. history book -amazon would show you results without showing you Amazon product posts.