search advice

[jenk]

news item, The Wall Street Journal

Web Searching With a Pro

You want to know how fast an F-16 flies, but your search engine spits back details on camera shutter speeds. To save yourself these detours, take a page from Sergey Brin, co-founder of the search-engine Google: Think more like a programmer and, instead of describing the information you want, think about the specific words you want back.

When Mr. Brin, who watches his waistline, wants to know how much protein is in a serving of chicken breast, he doesn't just type in "chicken breast" and "protein." He adds the word "grams."

Another of his winnowing tricks is to use the minus sign. To ensure that a search for "dolphins" doesn't bring up a slew of references to the Miami Dolphins football team, for instance, type dolphin -miami. (A space must be added before the minus sign, and the minus sign must go directly before the word to be removed.)

Mr. Brin has another secret. For local addresses and phone numbers, he uses Yahoo.

-- Mylene Mangalindan