Chapter 3: How to Write Good Search Queries on Google

What you type in the search box on Google is called the query. Google will try to find the most relevant result to your query by trying to find the words you typed on all webpages it has on its index. Writing a good query will help you get better results on Google, so let's learn how to do that.

Do Not Write Commands

First and foremost, do not write commands to Google. Do not write things like:

Tell me Krita's website!

Or:

Go to Krita's website.

That's because Krita's website may not contain the words Tell, me, website, Go, or to. If we write too many words that the webpage we want doesn't have in its text, Google will assume that webpage is irrelevant because it doesn't match our query very well, so it won't show us the very thing that we're searching for.

Type Only Keywords that Can be Found

The only word we're sure Krita's website will contain is the word Krita—as the whole website is about Krita—so if we want to search for Krita's website, we just search for:

Krita

When we're sure that the webpages in the results will contain certain words, we can type them.

For example, if we wanted to find a webpage that explains how to install Krita, that webpage would probably contain the words how to install Krita, so it's fine to type a normal phrase in this case.

It's possible that a page that explains how to do a thing doesn't actually include the phrase "how to," and instead says something like "tutorial" or "guide" or "lesson." In some cases, Google is smart enough to interpret the meaning of what you typed and try to find pages that match it, but that doesn't always happen. It's possible typing "krita installation tutorial" instead of "how to install krita" gets you different results, perhaps better results, perhaps worse results. If you can't find what you want with a query, try typing a similar query with different words and you might get different results.

It's also fine to add something like "official website" because some people do include that phrase in their websites. Most webpages that have reviews will have the word "review" on the webpage somewhere, most webpages about lyrics will have "lyrics," pages about recipes have "recipe," pages with download buttons will have "download," and so on.

Queries that Google Answers

Google can answer some queries if you type it in the form of a question. For example, if you type the following into Google:

What is the biggest country in the world?

Google will find you some page that answers that question. However, you could type just biggest country and get similar results, because the page that has that answer will contain the phrase "Russia is the biggest country in the world" or something similar to that, such as "the largest country," or "the most expansive country," and so on.

There are also some other phrases that Google may interpret in a special way, but in general you should avoid typing words that you don't believe are going to be in a webpage in the results.

Avoid Words that Google Ignores

By default, Google doesn't search for exactly what you typed in your query, and it will make several guesses and assumptions about what you want, even discarding or ignoring part of your query altogether. In some cases it's not even possible to search for some things at all, but, generally, it is possible to force Google to search for exactly what you want through methods we'll see below. A summary of things that Google ignores by default:

1. Short, common words: is, are, am, was, were, will, in, on, to, at, and, or, that, which, etc.
2. Casing: Spongebob, spongebob, SPONGEBOB, or SpONgeBoB are all the same to Google, so you don't need to start your queries with a capital letter.
3. Accented letters: áéíóú is the same as aeiou.
4. Symbols and punctuation: @, #, ?, etc.
5. The order of the words.

Sometimes Google may completely ignore everything you typed because it assumes you misspelled something.

See Words that Google Ignores for details.

Use Query Operators

There are certain things you can type in the search box, in your query, to control Google's behavior. These are called operators, and they can solve some of the problems highlighted above, as well as help you refine your searches further. Let's see how they work:

• Double Quote Operator:
  "milk and cereal", "incredible" "movies" - using double quotes around a phrase forces Google to search for it exactly, maintaining the order of the words. We can also use quotes around a single word to stop Google from searching for synonyms or making assumptions about whether a word is spelled correctly or not.
• Asterisk Operator:
  top * British * movies - an asterisk keeps the order of the words but allows a word or phrase to appear where the asterisk is, e.g. this matches "top 10 British comedy movies."
• Minus Operator:
  cereal -milk - using minus before a term excludes all results that contain that term.
• OR Operator:
  strawberry OR chocolate milk - typing OR in upper case or a vertical pipe (|) between two terms includes results that have one term or the other.
• Site Operator:
  site:reddit.com - typing site: before a domain shows only results from that domain.
• Range Operator:
  best movies 1990..1999 - typing two full stops between two numbers shows all pages that contain a number between them.

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