Using a search engine can seem like the easiest thing to do online, but that’s not really the case. These kinds of program and websites are actually quite complex, and they are different from one another. In other words, if you type a specific search phrase into two different search engines, you might find that you’re getting different information from each one of them. That’s both good and bad. It means that you may not want to limit yourself to just one search engine, because you might not get the information you really need. It also means that you may end up with great information that you wanted if you’re willing to explore using more than one search engine.
It’s a double-edged sword, and both convenient and not convenient at the same time. When you consider it carefully, though, it’s easy to see how something like this could happen. The sites that are thought to be important to you based on your search query are determined by an algorithm that takes several factors into account. Each company that creates a search engine uses a slightly different algorithm to give weight to websites that might be relevant to your search. Because of that, a site that would show up on the first page of a particular search engine’s results might show up on page three or four with a different search engine.
The more complex you are in your search, though, the more likely you’ll be to get results that make sense for you. Be descriptive and specific when you’re searching for something, because that can really allow you to find things that matter. If you’re too vague or search for too broad of a term, you can find that you get back a lot of results that you can’t do anything with – and that just gets frustrating.
