How to search for Freelance Writing Jobs on the Net
(presented by www.data-entry-jobs.net - data entry jobs)
By Robert Noyes
Many writers, and for that matter many others, don’t know how to search effectively on the Internet. Learning how to search to make money online will not only result in finding writing jobs that pay but improve your visits to the Internet overall.
The major search engines, Google, Ask, MSN, Yahoo, etc., ’spider’ websites with bots (automated programs) that index every single word on the pages they can get to on the sites they visit. Your searches at a search engine are actually conducted on massive storage devices that have saved the index of words created by these bots. (That’s why clicking on a result at a search engine sometimes takes you to a page that doesn’t exist or doesn’t contain the query you submitted – that page has changed since the last time the search engine spidered and indexed it.) Understanding these indexes, however, lets us conduct clever searches on them for writing jobs – and anything else we need.
A single word search will produce different results than multiple word searches. For example, ‘writing’ (without the single quotes) produces over 605,000,000 results on Google. ‘Writing jobs’ (again without the single quotes) produces 63,000,000 results. That’s because the Boolean operator ‘AND’ (named after George Boole who developed the logic in 1854) is implied in cases where two words are used together. In this case, ‘AND’ means basically, “Show me all pages containing the words ‘writing’ AND ‘jobs.’ Any pages that don’t have both these words exclude from my results.”
In both the ‘writing’ and ‘writing jobs’ cases, the engine searched its indexes and found every instance of the words searched, no matter how or where they appeared on the indexed page. For ‘writing job,’ results are returned not only on pages where the words ‘writing’ and ‘jobs’ are used together, as you’d submitted them, but also on pages where ‘writing’ and ‘jobs’ were no where near and had nothing to do with each other.
But there’s a fix, look at this…a search using qu!
otes, (d
ouble quotes this time), “writing jobs” produces 717,000 results, about 1/10th of the same search without quotes. Using double quotes tells the search engine to find only those pages where the words ‘writing and ‘jobs’ appear together in the order you listed them. “Jobs writing” produces even different results…62,300 to be exact.
Now, let’s make some money. Here are some real examples you can use. By adding words that make our search more exact, we can find writing jobs that pay and aren’t just for free, for donation or for the public domain. Put it all together in a Google search like this,
or
lead us to real writing jobs that really pay us.
There is a lot more to searching. Try using the minus sign (-) to exclude specific words, like ‘free,’ ‘donation,’ ‘public domain,’ etc., from your results. Better yet, check out the advanced features on your favorite search engines to learn how to maximize searching for your writing jobs.
