I was stuck on a question about local history for days until I tried a different search trick.

I needed to find out why a specific old building in my town was torn down in the 1960s, but regular searches just gave me generic results. After two days of nothing, I tried putting my exact question in quotes, like "why was the old mill on river street demolished". The first link was a scanned PDF of a local newspaper article from 1964 with the whole story. Has anyone else found a simple search trick that actually got them the exact answer they needed?

3 comments

3 Comments

gavinw457d ago

Yeah the quotes thing @the_margaret mentioned is basically how I talk to search engines now.

the_margaret16d agoTop Commenter

Honestly my search history is just a long list of me asking google questions like a confused grandparent. The quotes trick is a lifesaver though, it cuts out so much junk. I mean idk why it works so well but it feels like magic when you finally find that one weirdly specific article. Maybe it's just me but I also have to remember to search for the thing I actually want, not the thing I think google wants me to ask.

jordan_young16d ago

Try adding "site:gov" to find official records, like @the_margaret said.