Searching tips - Mac OS Tutorial

- [Instructor] Performing a basic web search through your web browser is pretty easy. As I previously mentioned, most web browsers these days have access to the most popular search engines, like Google and Bing, built directly in. Again for example here in Safari, I can go to Preferences. And here under Search, I can choose my default search engine. You can see Google is selected here, so any search I perform in Safari will be done through Google. But I could still go to the websites of Yahoo or Bing or DuckDuckGo, if I wanted to search through those search engines. I'll leave Google selected. And again, you can see it says here Search or enter website name. So if I wanted to perform a search, I could type right inside this field and enter a word or phrase. Now the technical term for performing a search is a query. Basically when you perform a query, you're asking the search engine to provide information relevant to the word or phrase that you search for. Most people just call it Googling these days which shows you how popular Google is as a search engine. To perform your search, type a word or phrase. Let's say I'm looking for information on repairing a hard drive. I'll start typing repairing, and as you can see that even before I finish typing, we have this area of Google suggestions. And these are some things that it thinks I might be looking for. These are based at least in part on the popularity of what other people have searched for. Nothing here really matches what I'm looking for, so I'll continue typing. And you can see, there's repairing hard drives. So without having to type in the rest, I'll just use the down arrow key on my keyboard to select that result, and press my return key. You can see that takes me to the Google website. My search term is up here in the Search field, and this is what Google considers the top result for that search term. You can see that it actually found 531,000 results. But Google and all search engines try to give you the most relevant results first. So I can scroll down to see the results. You can see that Google not only found webpages, but it also found a couple of videos on repairing hard drives. At the bottom of the page, Google offers me related or more specific search terms I might want to try to click to narrow down my search. And below that, I could click Next to continue to the next page of search results. I'm just going to scroll back up here. Now one of the keys to a successful search is to try to think of which words might appear on the kind of page you're looking for. For example, if I'm trying to find a fix or explanation of a specific problem I'm having with my hard drive, I'll imagine how I would describe it to a live person and try to distill it down to a short phrase that includes the important and relevant words. So if my hard drive is making clicking noises, I might type in the search field, hard drive clicking. Or I might type hard drive won't mount if it's not showing up on my computer. What you want to avoid is using words that might make your search either too broad or too narrow. For example, don't type something like documentation of hard drive repair techniques. Instead boil it down to the words that will most likely appear on the page you're looking for, like hard drive repair tips. In most cases, brevity is going to be the key to finding a good range of search results. Now some people use quotes around their words when searching for phrases. But you should only use quotes if you want results for the word within the quotes appearing in that specific order. For instance, I'll search for repairing hard drive without the quotes, and again that gives me 531,000 results. Notice that in many of the results the words repairing hard drive are not all together as a single phrase. So you can see they're in bold here, hard, repair, hard, hard drive, and so on. But if I only want search results for webpages in which repairing hard drive are all together in a row, I would put quotes around it. Notice that reduces the number of results to 7,270, and that in all the results the words repairing hard drive all appear next to each other. Using quotes is also a great computer troubleshooting technique. If you ever have a dialog box show up and you're not quite sure what it means, try typing the words from the dialog box in quotes into Google. More often than not, you're sure to find pages in which others have come across the same message. For example, something you occasionally see on Macs if you shut down your computer improperly is your computer shut down because of a problem. I can see it's right there, I'll select it, but I'm going to put it in quotes to make sure I get that exact phrase. And that gives me plenty of results with pages that explain what that message means and why it appears. So those are some tips for performing basic searches. And of course, once your search results appear, you can click any of the results to be taken to that particular webpage.