From the course: Working and Collaborating Online

Search more effectively in Bing

From the course: Working and Collaborating Online

Search more effectively in Bing

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- [Instructor] Search engines are designed to provide you with the best results that are most likely relevant to your search word or phrase. They can't always accurately predict what you're looking for but there are some techniques you can use to make it more likely you'll find what you need in the search results. I'm using the Bing search engine, which is the default search engine here in Microsoft Edge but these rules apply for nearly all search engines. First of all, there's no need to enter long sentences or phrases for your search. So don't type something like how do I bake a chocolate cake. instead, just type chocolate cake. And as you can see, those two words give me results for different recipes, photos of cakes, video lessons on how to bake chocolate cakes, and so on. For many types of searches, Bing and other search engines will offer search suggestions that can help you get to popular results more quickly. So for example, I want to find out what the weather in San Francisco is like right now. So I'll come back up to the address bar and start typing San Francisco. And as I type, several search suggestions appear below the search field. If you see the search term you want to use, instead of typing out the rest of it, just use your mouse to click the suggestion. And that quickly shows me the forecast for San Francisco as the top search result. Let's look at another example. I'm looking for a song I heard but I only remember a small portion of the lyrics. I'll type those lyrics, plans get in the way, followed by the word lyrics. To narrow down the results, I'll put quotes around the lyrics, followed by lyrics again. And that will find me lyrics that only have those words in that order. And in the results, I can see that that phrase is in bold for each link, letting me quickly read through to see if I recognize the song I'm looking for. You can also take advantage of Bing's search engine smart features. For example, I'll type square root of 144. And that not only gives me the correct answer but this is actually a real working calculator. So I can perform other calculations right from here. And below that, I can find other search results related to my original search about square roots. Another smart feature is the language translation. I can type something like say hello in French. And the first result gives me a direct translation. And like the calculator, this is a live tool. So I can type in other words and select other languages to translate. Or maybe I want to see how to say that in German. And there it is. So there you have several tips for getting more effective and useful results from your searches more quickly.

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