Quality Control

We all know the basic search engine techniques, such as phrase searches, keyword searches, and searches, or-not-near searches, etc.  Here are a few I didn’t know existed, ‘wildcard search’ and ‘nested searches’. Here is a short excerpt I pulled from a random site that explains the two in a simple manner.

WILDCARD SEARCHES: Wildcards searching generally places the symbol “*” after a word. It tells the database to look for variations of that word. For Example:

Investigation*

Might pull sites with words such as investigation, investigator, and investigative.

NESTED SEARCHING: Nested searching is usually one or more of the specialized search strategies describe above together. It might look something like this:

Investigator NEAR (British Columbia OR BC)

In the above example, you should pull investigators in British Columbia OR BC.

Additionally websites interface developers can also enhance search process by adding features to the interface such as autosuggest which is utilized by websites such as Apple. As most of you know, this feature helps suggest related products and items a user may be searching for, but apple has gone a step further as the related items come along with a picture!

Finally, have you ever heard of the concept called ‘Search engine optimization’, well I did last year and I also managed to understand it completely in 3.5 minutes. You can also, check out the video below!