A Search for the Term 'teenage driver'

When searching for more than one word, all search tools look for the words anywhere they appear within the text. They will usually consider hits as any place either word appears, in any order.  They do not have to appear next to each other. The word 'teenage' could be at the top of a page and the word 'driver' could be at the bottom. The search engine considers this a hit. Some search engines will return hits if only one word is  found. However, when ranking and presenting hits, search engines use complicated formulas which take into account the proximity of words and the number of times they appear in the article. Therefore, an article containing the words 'teenage  driver' as a phrase would be present before words that are further apart.

It doesn't bother me when a search returns a hit count in the thousands, or even in the millions. If the correct keywords have been used, I feel confident the desired  information will appear on the first few screens of hits. It is important to understand this method doesn't work all the time.

As you will see in the example, a Yahoo search is conducted differently than the others. Terms that work well  with other search engines may yield poor results at Yahoo. Since Yahoo is a human-indexed catalog, categories and general topics ARE preferred. When searching Yahoo, it is often best to start with a single search word or topic, and narrow  things down as you move from screen to screen.

See the Results of Searches at:

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