Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2005 1:21 pm
As you point out, the first challenge on doing web searches is a good choice of search terms. The second point I usually apply a little judgment is deciding which of the returned selections to click on.
In this case, I used "html metatag" (without the quotes, which changes the results). It gave 1.7 million matches. The "How To Use HTML Meta Tags" was the third page listed but the first one I looked at. The first listed was "HTML META, REL and REV Tags" but the "how to use" part of entry 3 caught my attention.
Interestingly enough, Google also returned "Did you mean: html meta tag" and clicking on it returned a list with "How To Use HTML Meta Tags" moved up above "HTML META, REL and REV Tags". There were 6.3 million matches that way.
One other point to keep in mind is to try to select search words that will weed out as many pages as possible without missing the pages of interest. The articles "a an the" are obvious bad words. Google even throws out some of the most common words without using them in the search. In fact a search for "a an the" returns 4.6 BILLION pages. "meta tag" by itself only finds a little over 11 million pages, while "Help Files" finds nearly 400 million pages. Putting all 4 words into the search only takes it down to about 3.9 million pages. So adding "Help Files" only resulted in about a 3 to 1 reduction.
Where there are a lot of pages, the main challenge is to try to weed out pages that won't be helpful. The trick on harder to find topics is to not accidentally miss pages that may be helpful.
In this case, I used "html metatag" (without the quotes, which changes the results). It gave 1.7 million matches. The "How To Use HTML Meta Tags" was the third page listed but the first one I looked at. The first listed was "HTML META, REL and REV Tags" but the "how to use" part of entry 3 caught my attention.
Interestingly enough, Google also returned "Did you mean: html meta tag" and clicking on it returned a list with "How To Use HTML Meta Tags" moved up above "HTML META, REL and REV Tags". There were 6.3 million matches that way.
One other point to keep in mind is to try to select search words that will weed out as many pages as possible without missing the pages of interest. The articles "a an the" are obvious bad words. Google even throws out some of the most common words without using them in the search. In fact a search for "a an the" returns 4.6 BILLION pages. "meta tag" by itself only finds a little over 11 million pages, while "Help Files" finds nearly 400 million pages. Putting all 4 words into the search only takes it down to about 3.9 million pages. So adding "Help Files" only resulted in about a 3 to 1 reduction.
Where there are a lot of pages, the main challenge is to try to weed out pages that won't be helpful. The trick on harder to find topics is to not accidentally miss pages that may be helpful.
and it really is a great piece of software..