Tech Table Tuesday, May 20, 2014
May 20, 2014
Justin: Welcome to MPA’s Tech Table. I’m Justin.
Diana: And I’m Diana.
Justin: And we’re your hosts. We’ll be serving up a heaping spoonful of all things tech.
Diana: We promise, it will be easy to digest. Well, hello there, Justin. It is Tuesday.
Justin: Oh my goodness, yeah. It’s Tuesday all right. And before we went on the air here, we were having a beauty consultation between you and our engineer, Noel.
Diana: Well, that’s just the best thing to talk about right now.
Justin: Yeah, for you. I almost fell asleep over here.
Diana: That’s all right. Go ahead.
Justin: Yeah, I know. I’ve never heard anything like nail art?
Diana: Nail art.
Justin: What is that?
Diana: Art for your nails.
Justin: I don’t understand. I’m not-, I don’t need to understand.
Diana: There’s a rhyme or reason there that you do certain colors and shapes.
Justin: It sounds like ways to spend money to me.
Diana: Hm. Yeah. Yeah. That’s about right.
Justin: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. All right. So, hey let’s go on to our Tech topic here.
Diana: Okay.
Justin: Using plus, minus, and quote symbols to narrow your searches.
Diana: Yeah.
Justin: That’s our topic today.
Diana: Yeah, your searches online.
Justin: Right.
Diana: Right.
Justin: So, like nail + art, is that what you’re talking about?
Diana: Yes. Yes.
Justin: All right, you’ll have to explain this to me; I never use these things.
Diana: Okay, well let’s say you’re looking up apples on Google. If you were to just type in the work apples, you get 22 million returns.
Justin: Okay.
Diana: Or thereabouts.
Justin: Sure.
Diana: You know, give or take.
Justin: Give or take a few.
Diana: That’s actually a few more sites than you can check in an afternoon.
Justin: Well, yeah. 22 million is probably a few.
Diana: Mm-hm.
Justin: Absolutely.
Diana: Yeah. So, we need to narrow the search down a bit.
Justin: Sure.
Diana: So, then let’s say that you’re actually truly interested in green apples.
Justin: All right. So I-, I’m getting to see where this is going. You’re going to type apples + green.
Diana: Yes. Apples + green. And we are talking about the plus symbol.
Justin: Yeah, the plus symbol . Don’t type out the word, but use the plus symbol. So it’s like apples + green + nail + art. Green apple nail art.
Diana: Wow. That’ll be very interesting to see what comes up.
Justin: There you go.
Diana: But now if you put in apples + green, now you will only see the apple sites that also have the word “green” on them.
Justin: Right, but you’ll probably still going to get like 6 million or so returned websites.
Diana: Yes, but 6 million is many, many fewer than 22 million.
Justin: So you actually-, you actually can subtract a word.
Diana: You can.
Justin: From the search results. So, if you type in apple + green computers, then you’re going to get like one million.
Diana: Right.
Justin: Returns.
Diana: Because if you think about apple, sometimes Apple computer’s come in the color green.
Justin: Exactly.
Diana: So, you have to get rid of all those computer things.
Justin: There you go.
Diana: And how do you know that? If you’re looking at the search results that are coming up from say apples + green, and you’re seeing a bunch of computer things, just take out that computer word with a minus.
Justin: Sure. That’s interesting.
Diana: Yeah, so now we’re down to about a million and.
Justin: A million returns, but that’s still about 5 million web pages the way the return works.
Diana: Right.
Justin: So, the final way to narrow down the search is to use the quotes to narrow the search down to an exact phrase. So you could do, if you were looking for Granny Smith apples, you do apples + green then subtract the computers. And then use quotes around Granny Smith.
Diana: Yes. Now you’ll only see websites that have the words Granny Smith on them in that order.
Justin: My goodness.
Diana: Spelled exactly that way. So, you’ve got to make sure that they are spelled correctly. And that, exactly, using quotes is a great way to narrow your search. So, we went from having 22 million webpages returned from our original search for apples to around only 220,000 for the last example.
Justin: That’s unbelievable. That’s unbelievable. So, basically, by the time you figure out all your search stuff, you could use green apple nail art and bake an apple pie.
Diana: You could. Let’s try the whole thing.
Justin: There you go. Just kidding. So,yeah, take a look at using plus, minus, and quotes to narrow your searches. Until next time.
Diana: Take care.
Justin: Tech Table is brought to you by MPA of Bloomfield, Iowa, and God’s country radio. You can visit us online at askmpa.com
Diana: If you have questions or comments, please send them to questions@askmpa.com. That’s questions@askmpa.com.
Justin: And thanks for listening.
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