#the keywords confuse the shit out of me#I can’t keep them straight in my head and mix them all up#half the time when I use them it tells me there are no search results.#they only told me about them my junior year of collage so I was already fucked
If you wanted to yell your request for information to your friend on the other side of a loud, crowded party in, like, 3 words, what 3 words would you pick? Those are your search terms.
So in our example in the first post, you do NOT type the full question into your search engine. Making google parse things like ‘list’, ‘5′, and ‘explain’ is going to muddy your results, and this is especially true if you care enough about your data that you’re not using google. Your search terms (WITHOUT quotation marks) would be “famous Africans”, or “famous African people” or “prominent Africans” if you want to be more discerning about what kinds of answers you get.
If you do a lot of online research (as kids in school should do), you pretty quickly get a sense of what sorts of terms are best. For instance, “famous African people” is better than “famous Africans” because the latter is likely to be keywords in a lot of fluff journal article titles, whereas “famous African people” is more likely to bring up lists. “Prominent” will bring up more wealthy businessmen and political leaders, whereas “famous” will bring up more entertainers. But any of these will work. Just pretend the search engine is someone who can’t hear you very well and wants the clearest question in the smallest number of words.
(Although this specific example is bad because anyone with internet research experience answering this question would just go straight to wikipedia, who have lists of these kinds of things, and pick 5 names they like the sound of).
Also, if you wanna get fancy, print this out and stick it on your wall:
(link to higher resolution image)
It will make your life SO MUCH easier. (And, as you can see, this is why typing some questions into google verbatim is a bad idea, especially if you don’t use quotation marks. Not using the quotes and typing in anything with ‘and’ or ‘or’ in it can confuse the search engine.)