I have been wanting for some time now to start a series based around helping people find better results in Google. One thing that immediately comes to mind that bugs me lately is when trying to search for a product review, the results that come back are mostly based around buying the product from some shopping site. While this shows me what I can buy I think Google really needs to work on whats relevant to me and not make me surf though 3-4 pages to find something thats really a review and not a shopping site.

A typical search that you would think would work for searching for a product review would be:

product name review

While this works with some items you might find your self looking at 2 pages or more of shopping results. What you can do next is us the ‘-’ (minus key) to remove keywords that you don’t want in your search. What does that mean you say?

Well we know that most shopping sites have some common keywords in them such as “buy”,”buy now”,”add to cart”,”shipping”. Now with this in mind you can refine your search and use the minus key (to remove any searches with keywords you don’t want).

An example of a new search would be:

product name review -buy -shipping

What this tells Google now is to filter our sites that have the keywords buy or shipping in them. This hopefully will display more relevant sites with more of a review about your product than just something from a shopping site with one user review.

So next time when your looking for something to buy try using the ‘-’ key with keywords to get better search results and hopefully a better searching experience.

Look for more tips to come soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Rants and Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.