People are always asking me in my store "How do you research online".  Friends and family often come to me to find things for them because it usually only takes me a matter of minutes to find what I'm looking for online. Searching online can be frustrating but it doesn't have to be that bad!

I'm going to share a little searching secret that I use.  First off, my favorite venue of search is Google.com. I've tried them all and google is easier and yields better results with greater accuracy in my opinion. But you can use this tip with all search engines.

Let's say your looking for a red Carnival glass pitcher. You go to google and type in Carnival Glass right? First off, you want to be more specific.

Carnival glass  = 6,400,000 results   wow that's going to take you months to go through!

Let's try Carnival glass pitcher  = 355,000

But we can do a little better

red carnival glass pitcher  = 261,000 This is still going to take a while.

Now the secret, we can get this down quite a bit. You're just dying to know, aren't you?

Put quotes onto your search  = "red carnival glass pitcher"

Search results for "red carnival glass pitcher"   = 1,640  WOW WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

The reason for this is that when you don't use quotes the search engine brings back every page with any of the words. By using the quotes you will get results back that contained EXACTLY what's in between the quotes.

So let's try a little experiment. Open your browser. Come on, I promise this won't hurt a bit.

Go to google.com

Type in   "people who enjoy antiques and vintage goods"

What did you find?