I'm someone who uses a search engine like Google or Ask maybe once or twice a week at the most, so I'm really curious about what those of you who do literally hundreds of searches every single day are searching for and if you get good results.

(The few times I've ever tried one of the smaller search engines usually ended up in results that weren't very helpful and even were sometimes irrelevant to the keyword I'd clicked or typed in or only lead to another search engine, so I gave up on them as being a valid source of information.)

I use them to find some revenue to make extra bucks for a site...and if I use yahoo to search and I got results...go to goole and search---see if the site was good or not(like pay or not)

It goes on and on...

Even with some search email...I see a target key word that target what I need to find than I use them to find it...and go to other search engine to double check if the site I am looking for is good.

Plus the results---if it show up 2 or 3 times in a big search engine than I will think that site is good!

But it just me thou!

WOW, you use them only once or twice a week ?

Last 2-3 days I searched for
- Petit Prince
- Tom's Cabin
- Crohn disease
- fruits
- Converting ?C - ?F
- Parked domains
- quotes
- Un giorno credi
- fran?ais anglais dictionnaire
- domains
- design
- djembe
- yahoo news
- wikipedia
- m?t?o
- Cou?
- Pens?e positive
- coureurs F1
- Virgin
- la une belgique
- Wimbledon

etc ....

If I look for litterature and things like that or if I search in french, I mostly use google, if I look for what is more computer related I might use various search engines and compare the sites found.

Hi,

I use search engine everyday, google main...most of time i search for "money making" related, also i search for my site keywords, to know, is it dropped or still there in search engines...

Yep, tis true....some weeks I don't use them at all. I've used Google once this week to look up a poem for a contest, but that's been it.

hehe sophieca converting ?C - ?F
It doesnt matter, its hot anyway

my life online wouldn't be same without google !
And I literally do hunders of searches per day.
I use a lot of different search queries in google

Like placing text in between " " to search for lines of text, or specific words.

or define: to search for definitions.

inurl:// or , allinurl:// to search for words that appear in url's

I also search in google's cache to see when - or if - my websites are indexed

And I even dreamed once that I lost something important, and I searched for it in google

I usually use Ask if I'm trying to actually find an answer, since I can never seem to find anything with the SEs sent in my mails. I have actually found a few cute sites with them, though. I'm usually searching for recipes, cooking info, baby info, gardening...the usual housewife things. The other day, I used EVERY single one of my search mails to look up stinging insects to try and figure out without a doubt what the gross buzzy thing that was in my house was. Turns out, I'm pretty sure it was a yellow jacket. Hubby tried to tell me it was an overgrown honeybee. As someone who is deathly afraid of stinging insects, I knew it wasn't.

So I actually DO use my search mails to look up things. If I don't have something to search for, I don't search. If this gets me less mails, oh well. It's not like I'm not a member of a kajillion programs anyway. Getting rid of one isn't going to hurt me. But I'm one of those people who will read something or hear something or just THINK of something and then spend all day trying to find out all I can about it. Plus, I'm always looking for new recipes!

But why, oh why, when I search one of the PPC engines for Recipes, do they send me to a bunch of sites about mesothelioma or forex information? I mean, that helps, like...not at all.

A variety of things. I'm not giving a complete detailled listing because it's not really anyone's business.

I'm ALWAYS nline searching for stuff, even off Ask, Google, Yahoo, Dogpile etc. I've actually spent the last 5 months researching elements for my novel alone on each and every engine listed and then some.. I would nearly exhaust or exhaust every result before moving to the next engine, then I'd reword the same query and start all over again. Some things I researched:

Amazon book titles (I just placed an order with them to the tune of $63)

CARS Happy Meal toys on EBAY for my son (this was on a paid search and free search engine.) He's missing SALLY from the set and I'm hoping to buy him one.

Aquarium items. Be it decor, live fish etc. (both paid and free searches)

Small animal items. This was both a paid and free search. I spent over $50 on items online for my hamster a couple months ago.

Online air tickets. We already bought ours, but places like ORBITZ charges same as our travel agent. Should the prices drop from what we paid we high tail it to our travel agent for a voucher on our next flight.

Cabins to take a vacation to. (This didn't turn up anything in our area on a paid search, but I tried it.)

Free graphics sites (free search engines)

Articles on writing tips. (I do this CONSTANTLY on the free engines each and every engine I can think of is used.)

Book Publishing (both a free and paid search engine is used for this.) I'm not yet ready to publish but I want a good overview of publishers out there now.

Elements for my novel: Police procedures, Crime Scene procedures, Death Penalty, Newark, Lethal Injection, Killers, Sociopaths, Psychopaths, Serial Killers, Mind of a killer, Disposal of bodies, Methods of murder

Mystery writing (free engines)

POV (checking how/if I can do a different shifting POV in novel) - free engines

Digital Cameras (free and paid engines) I'm eventually looking for a new digital camera so I'm 'window shopping' now.

Recent medical ailments I was battling.

Looking online for a small cassette player for my son who claimed a ton of unwanted cassettes his. (both paid and free engines)

Fitness info (free and paid search)

Mystery book club/book clubs (both free and paid searches)

Writing forums (free searches)

Laptops (free and paid searches) I actually bought one for $36 on EBAY earlier this year.

The list goes on and on and on.

if I am really wanting to find soemthing its usually related to gaming

I mainly look for online tutorials and downloads. Tutorials for photoshop/ paintshop and such. They are the ones that helped me to learn how to make banners etc. I search for sites with pictures ... Legolas mainly, my kid is crazy about him. I also look for pictures that I can use to make my banners. But I mainly use google and yahoo. Not the other search thingies...

Enchanted have you ever checked out

http://camelot.renderosity.com/tut.ez

it's a great site for beginners and it has pretty decent forums.

Ender, thank you so much for that link. I am there now. Will look around. I had a load of free photoshop 7 tutorials with me and was going to share all that with another forum, but my puter was formatted and a new usergroup created and all that. I lost everything I had bookmarked. Now I have to do a lot of searching again

Thank you once again for that link

I hope you find it useful. It's geared towards a different group of internet users but if your artsy it's a great place to start.

It looks very interesting. I am going to register now. I am nuts about creating spheres. The first thing I saw in the link was about how to create a shiny sphere

Google is much better for information searching as PPC engines are not really going to get those type of sites listed. An advertiser who pays for PPC advertising is usually advertising a site with some kind of sales need, that is why they are willing to spend so much money to be listed, they are not just providing free information. If you are only looking for information, you will tend to get frustrated with PPC engines.



Mesothelioma and forex and mortgages etc, when people buy the service being advertised, the PPC advertiser makes a lot of money, that is why those type of things tend to be quite common, especially in the lower tier PPC engines. For those website advertisers, it's about spending money to make money, not to make a nice website that people may enjoy or find useful information from. I think it's a shame more PPC engines don't make this much clearer on the search boxes, but if you look at the keywords on most of the portals I think you will see it is sites where 'money' and 'sales' are key, rather than information. Compare the top searches on a PPC engine - viagra, auto insurance etc - to the top searches on google or yahoo - pop stars, sporting events, other information based queries and again you can see this.

I used to do heaps of family history and used google alot. I only ever use google. Lately I have been checking out karate sites Wax on Wax off.

I try not to search unless I really have something I want to look for or I just feel like browsing, but I've been doing searches for baby stuff lately since one of my sisters just had a baby and the other is trying to get pregnant. I also look up french goods and other things I'd like to maybe buy or sell on Ebay. And if I'm really bored, I'll just click on various links in the search engine window and browse. Oh, and if I'm really hungry, I'll do searches for things like chocolate, cookies and cakes. LOL There's nothing like drooling over photos of sweets when you're trying to diet. tehehe...

I don't really consider myself a searcher and never opt in for search emails but couldn't imagine life without google Have it set as my home page and am like the other person in this thread who said "I'm one of those people who will read something or hear something or just THINK of something and then spend all day trying to find out all I can about it". That's me

I don't usually last all day as I get distracted easily lol, but I love information and anything historical, biographical, newsy, etc .... I see on tv and want to know more about google is the place I go. Also use it to search for info/complaints on products/services. Have seen quite a few ads for an mlm called BioPerformance lately which is a fuel additive/performance enhancer. Figured it was the usual bs which it turned out to be lol but since the idea of increased performance and cost savings was inticing ended up spending quite a few hrs on google reading about bio/alternative fuels so I learned something new.

Also research home improvement projects and alternative/homeopathy medicine for myself and my animals quite often. And then there's the little things like songs, movies, books, etc .... basically any time I want to know something I head for google

Only have a couple of gpt programs where searchs are not opt out, at least not from the member profile, and those programs send only a few. I'll usually keep the newest search email if it's for at least 1/2 cent and then if there's a specific product I want I'll use that link because I plan on buying what I'm looking for if the price/quality/location meets my requirements

I use Yahoo the most to search. If I need to find a research paper I use Google Scholar. Looking mostly for health-related info right now but also other stuff. I do a few searches in GPT. Some results are not good at all but I have been able to find some helpful sites that way.