Although many people are happy just to type in a query and click on the search button, many people might not know of the functions that are now being applied to today’s search engines. Firstly we’ll cover the basics and some of the additional commands that can help refine your search.

When you first open your search engine of choice you will be presented with a text box to type your search into. This is usually where most people just type in their query and hit the search button and get positive results. But what if the matches that are brought up don’t quite tally with what you are actually searching for? Well, there are ways of refining your search and certain commands that can be typed into the search box to help you do this.

• “quoted text”: If you are looking for a precise match to a phrase you are searching for then placing it within quote marks will enable the search engine to know that it needs to look for that specific phrase.
• + search term: Sometimes a search engine will provide many results for a term and sometimes can only produce results on 1 part of a query, to ensure that all terms are associated with each other then place a + in front of all you terms.
• ~ synonym search: To save you having to write a long list of words or terms of a similar nature within the search box you can simply add a ~ in front of the word that you would like to find articles on and the search engine will also search based on similar words and phrases.
• | & OR searches: Use the when you are looking for 2 separate terms in your search. For example you would like to book a hotel but you want to choose from either Leeds or Sheffield then you would simply type ‘Hotels Leeds OR Sheffield’ and this will return results for both.
• - terms: You can search for a term but ask the engine to exclude a particular word, for example looking for football clubs in Manchester but not United you would type ‘football club manchester -united’
• number ranges: When looking for items within a certain number range then you would simply type … in between the numbers you are looking for.

In the early days of the internet a search engine did exactly what it said, provided a return of pages for your inputted query. But nowadays many are trying to build a full user experience. You can use the main three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) for any number of things including calculations, conversions (e.g pounds to U.S dollars), text translation into and from other languages, maps and directions.

In fact on the face of it, functionally speaking, there appears to be no real differences to the engines. Although once you have loaded them up then you can easily see the aesthetic differences between them.

Everyone has a preference for one or the other when it comes to search engine, it is a choice and people do tend to stay loyal to the brand that they have chosen.

Now let us have a look closely at some of the additional functions available to you:

Calculator

Simply type the calculation you’d like to be done into the search box and press the search button.

Conversions

19 us dollars in pounds - entering a phrase like this will show you how many pounds 19 dollars will get you, this also stands true for many other currencies

Translation

MSN, Google and Yahoo all have translators to help you convert one language into another, they can be found at the following links:

http://www.google.com/translate_t
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
http://translator.live.com/

All of these pages can translate a variety of languages into english and in some cases vice versa.

Maps & Directions

all 3 engines offer a map function, however Google’s has a few more functions that set it apart from the others. In particular Google provides you with public transport routes for any directions you are taking and also does not need the full address of your destination to produce a route.