What if you were looking for the results of all the pizza delivery restaurants around you what would you do? If you go to Yahoo and enter the following"pizza,+you zip code" with out the quotes. I live in 31520 so I would enter in Pizza,+31520 and the results would be all the pizza restaurants that are in 31520 zip code. If I only wanted Pizza delivery places then I would enter "pizza delivery",+31520. Pizza delivery would have to be entered in quotes in order to properly only return the results that you needed. Without the quotes you would get results for every pizza place and every place that does delivery.

Let us say we were doing a search on George Washington with all results based on the year 1775 we would then using quotes enter in "George Washington",+1775 in the search box. The '+' sign will guarantee that all your results will contain the keyword that follows the + sign in it.. If you are looking for all the free software site then try entering this into the search box+"free software" as opposed to just free software.

When we did the search on my name by entering the middle initial we narrowed the search as opposed to just entering my first and last name. There are 2 people in this world with the name Jeff Solochek. Now if we did a search using J Solochek we would get many more returned results because my stepmothers first name begins with the letter J.

A lot of the search engines, when doing a search for the same topic, will return different numbers of results. The reason for this is that they have different indexes they use. Some of the search engines share the same index. But if Google is not returning enough results then try the search engine AlltheWeb which has a larger index the Google. Now there are some web sites that will allow you to search multiple engines at the same time. I have a utility on my desktop that allows this. Also, what I get as returned results on my name today could be higher or lower tomorrow because these indexes are updated all the time.