Learn How to Search – It’s on for Young and Old.

Back in February, Hitwise released a report highlighting a 20% increase in 8 word keyword searches over the previous year and that searches containing 5 keywords or more had increased by 9%. In the same period, 1-4 word search queries were down 2%.

Oh I know how you love your stats late of a Wednesday.

Well, another recent study shows how Europeans are abandoning brand searches and plumping for more sophisticated longer search terms instead. Not that the study / report indicates what kind of search terms we’re looking at, although it claims the predominant nationalities for long-winded searching are the Italians, Germans and the British.

Now I’ve always been interested in the search process and admit to laying a little egg of excitement every time I type something into my browser’s search bar.

I’m quite happy to throw as many words into a search as I can muster. I’m also no stranger to asking questions directly or typing complete phrases.

But, there are also quite a few other cute little tricks you can type into Google to help your search experience.

Flights: Did you know that by simply typing in two airport codes you can do a flight search? Try atl jfk.

Weather: Just by typing weather followed by a city or zip code you get, well, the weather. Try weather wheeling wv

Movies: By putting in movie star trek you can easily find local show times as well as a host of reviews.

And those are just three of a multitude of operators, calculators and search shortcuts you can perform to make life a little bit easier for yourself. Here’s the full lowdown that you can play about with.

Now I’m presuming you’re all fairly clever little soldiers and if you don’t know all of them, you can pick up on the ones you find useful fairly easily.

But, I do think the ability to search is something that should be cultivated in the young. Not just the ability to search quickly and efficiently, but also to revel in the sheer enjoyment of having all this stuff at your fingertips and utilize it properly.

“Check me Boolean operators out.”

Of course they’re doing this in schools, but there’s no harm in starting them off early or helping them along the way, is there?

So why not use the following teachers’ resource:

Tools for Teaching Stupendous Search Habits

It contains a whole host of interesting ways of teaching kids how to search and perform research using search engines.

Go on, have a dabble – I dare you! If nothing else you’ll learn AlltheWeb is still going!

And you might even learn how to cut your search terms down by a word or two.