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Using Quotes In Searches
Let’s suppose you want to do a research paper on the order that having law provides. You decided to do a Google search for order and law. Have you ever wondered what the difference between the following two searches would be?
Order and Law
“Order and Law”
With the first search, the one without the quotation marks, you obtain the following first results:
Notice that the first search result has nothing to do with your topic of research — it is simply the website of a prime time television show. Also, Google says that there are approximately 55.8 million search results.
Next, if you simply add quotes to the phrase order and law, check out what happens:
Your first two search results are both very relevant to the topic that you want to write about in your research paper. Also, you can see that Google only returned 127,000 search results.
You may be saying to yourself that there is no way you’d ever be able to get through 127,000 search results, let alone 55.8 million! That brings me exactly to the point I want to make: When it comes to search, less results are better. You will never be able to sort through 127,000 results, however it is much better to have 127,000 results that are relevant to your paper, than to simply have 55.8 million results that you have to weed through.
When we added quotes to the search, Google cut out nearly 55.7 million results, leaving us with a small group of about 0.1 million results (127,000) that are relevant. This makes much more efficient use of your valuable time, and lets you focus on writing the content of your research paper.
When you don’t use quotes in your searches, you will get results that could contain the keywords you entered in any particular, random order. By using quotes, you ensure that the search engine will return results with the keywords or phrase in the exact order that it was entered.
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