We have all had the joy of opening a search engine such as Google, typing in a keyword or two and coming back with millions of results. It would take the square root of eternity to work through the results. There are easy ways to better refine the results you receive. For the purpose of this article I will use Google as the search engine but the rules apply to all of the various sites.

Let’s say we are looking for Lenovo laptops like the tablet pc Steve discussed on the show. If you simply type Lenovo Laptop into the search box on the Google page you get a list of 1,920,000 results. A little much to say the least. A quick thing to reduce the list is to select only Canadian sites. This can be done by simply clicking the circle beside “Pages From Canada” under the search box. When you then click search you will only receive results from Canadian sites. Once I made this selection the results dropped to 391,000. Quite a reduction. But we can do better still. If you add more keywords to the search field you reduce your results yet again. If you add the word tablet the results total is now down to 39,300.

 To narrow down the list further you can use things like quotation marks and + or – signs in the search. If your search term is “Lenovo Tablet Laptops” the results would only be ones that had this entire, exact phrase on them. If you use + signs between the words then the site must have each word in it but not necessarily in an exact phrase. You can of course mix and match these items. For example you can look for Lenovo Laptops but not tablet computers by putting +Lenovo+Laptops-Tablet. Or if you wanted to look for the phrase Lenovo Laptops but not include tablet units you can use “Lenovo Laptops”-tablet.

These are mainly guidelines on how to do searches on the internet. My recommendation would be to find something that you are interested in and try performing searches. Using the few easy steps mentioned above you will be amazed at how quickly and easily that you can dig out the information you are looking for from the vast expanse of the internet.