The World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast information resource that can be used to answer almost any question you may have. Wondering about the recommended internal temperature for a hamburger cooked on a BBQ, whether a plant you just bought likes sun or shade, or need a user manual for some piece of electronics you own, the web likely has the answer somewhere – the trick is being able to find that “somewhere”.

Effective Searching

Search engines essentially look for web pages that contain the words you are searching for, and use internal guidelines to choose which of these pages they think will be most relevant to your search. Whether you are using Google, Bing, Yahoo or some other search engine, there are a number of techniques that will help you locate what you are looking for:

• Pick descriptive search words. Words such as “the”, “of”, “and”, etc. are very common, and occur on most web pages, so including them doesn’t necessarily enhance your search results. So searching for “internal temperature cooked hamburger” will typically give you nearly the same results as searching for the “what should be the internal temperature of cooked hamburger”.
• Add or delete search words. If your search results aren’t specifically what you are looking for, consider adding another descriptive word to your search to narrow the results. Similarly, if you get too few search results, consider removing a word from your search.
• Choose the type of search. Search engines usually default to “All” (e.g. web pages, images, news, etc.). For example, if you were searching for something like “flu season”, if you choose the “News” tab, your search results will be more relevant to this year’s flu season, rather than flu season during any year.

Paid versus UnPaid Results

Most web site search engines make money by selling space (often near the top of the search results). The advertiser chooses words (e.g sporting equipment), a region (e.g. Greater Vancouver), a demographic (e.g. persons aged 20-60), and a variety of other factors, and then when a person who meets the criteria searches using the chosen search words, the advertiser’s website appears near the top of the search results.

The search results that appear below the paid results are the unpaid results, and the websites that appear are chosen by the search engine using a proprietary formula (which is not usually disclosed outside the company). Things such as how many visits a website receives, how many other websites link to it, and a variety of other factors help websites place higher in search engine results. The search engine’s goal is to provide you with relevant results (otherwise you would switch to a different search engine), and websites that don’t pay the search engines directly often pay other companies to assist them with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The goal of most for-profit companies is to appear on the first page of results returned by the search engine.

So be aware of the difference between the paid and the unpaid results. The paid results are usually indicated, typically with the word “Ad” at the beginning.

Paid results can be useful (they can be a link to the website you are looking for), or alternatively, they can belong to businesses with unethical business practices. As an example, some concert websites can be problematic, as you can often find multiple web sites claiming to be the “official” website for concert tickets. Clicking on the very first web site in the search results (remember the first few sites are usually the sites that have paid to be there) can lead you to a site claiming to be the “official” site, but in fact is not, and when you purchase the ticket through them, all that simply happens is that they buy the ticket for you through from an official site, and charge you a hefty mark-up in the process.

In general, you are much less likely to end up at a website with questionable business practices if you ignore the paid results (those with “Ad” beside them), and look at the unpaid results immediately below.

Media Attributions

• “engine address internet www” by SVG Silh has been designated to the public domain (CC0). This work is an adaptation of “Google Question Search Online” on Pixabay.