Search smarter, not harder: How to find absolutely anything about weddings dresses and bridal gown resources online.

How to get more focused and exact results. For both MAC and Windows users!

MAC Users
Mac has a wonderful search engine called "Safari." Scan all the latest news, information and articles from thousands of websites in one simple-to-read, searchable article list delivered right to you. The magic of Safari RSS means you stay on top of your favorite interests without feeling like you’re ever missing out.

Safari puts everything you need to browse, search, view RSS feeds and manage your bookmarks in a clean, easy-to-use navigation bar.

You can add some powerful tools to your Mac when searching for wedding dresses or bridal accessories online. Go to Google Software Downloads for MAC.

WINDOWS Users
When doing a search on any of the following search engines, string together all the relevant terms to be specific. If you are looking for a bargain in wedding tiaras, type in "half-price wedding tiaras" or "discount wedding tiaras". Putting quotation marks around words will limit the search even further: If you type in discount bridal tiaras, your hits will include sites like this one: Discount christmas trees, addresses of bridal shows, and racks of reindeer antlers that resemble tiaras can be found at this site. Not at all what you're looking for! Using quotation marks will only find sites that use those three words together in that exact sequence.

Many search engines will ignore small words like or, but if you put it in all caps, it will broaden your search. Type "wedding veils OR tiaras" to find information about either of the two popular headpieces. Using “and”  & “with” will narrow the search, not broaden it. Google ignores the “and” delimiter, but some search engines will use it to narrow your search. Most include it automatically between words as a boolean plus sign. You can also include the minus sign to eliminate hits, for instance tiaras - antlers to avoid finding sites about hunting instead of sites like Princess Bride Tiaras, or sites about wedding tiaras. Tiaras is also a brand of yacht.

Google is a big favorite right now. It ranks pages by how many links they have from other pages and does not offer its top spots in search rankings for sale. Type in a search phrase and be very specific. Don't type in bridal gowns unless you want to discover a shop in Taiwan or Nepal. Type Louisville bridal gowns. If you get too many hits, put quotation marks around the words: "Louisville bridal gowns", which will only give you sites that have that exact phrase somewhere in them. Your hits will be more focused, but you might not get what you want, so try bridal shops Louisville or something similar. Go ahead and try it!

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Google provides many hits to sites that have nothing to do with what you are looking for, because it is set up to discover specific words or information. Hitting the “I feel lucky” button is not very productive for bridal searches because it simply takes you directly to the first site on its list. If you just want general information on, say, weddings, go to a metabrowser like:

AOL Search, Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, and Netscape Search have one thing in common. They make heavy use of the Open Directory, which uses volunteer editors to catalog sites. If a search in Yahoo fails to find a match for "Lea-Ann Belter wedding dress", then matches from Google are displayed. Google matches also appear after all Yahoo matches have first been shown. These search engines are excellent for bridal gown searches because they are more focused on businesses that provide a product or service, and less focused on news, dictionary, or reference information.

Looksmart is a directory compiled by humans (as opposed to spider robots). They provide results to MSN Search, Excite and many lesser-known partners.

In Google, try wedding dresses as an image. This can bring up some great bridal salons in your area, not just in Cincinnati Ohio, which seems to be the world center of wedding dress shops right now, especially the Reading Bridal District.

Yahoo offers an advanced search, which essentially makes use of delimiters that you select before launching the search. This is more useful than just using the main search button, which will give you too many unrelated hits.

WEBSITE DIRECTORIES - Bad News!
Avoid directories unless you have a lot of time on your hands to waste. Directories are not designed to provide relevant, helpful information to brides. They are designed to be what Google calls a "link farm"--pages and pages of links to other sites which link back to the directory. The entire purpose of a directory is to achieve high ratings with Google in order to show up in the top 10 hits when you type in "wedding dresses" or whatever. They derive their income by charging for advertising on their directory.

The main problem with this is that they contain too much non-relevant content when you are doing a targeted search for a specific topic. The pages are so cluttered that they do not provide a pleasant, efficient, and rewarding experience for the website visitor. In short, they don't deliver an appropriate payoff for all the clicking and waiting you have to do. Some of the worse ones actually contain gobbledygook instead of real text, paragraphs of random content loaded with keywords for the search engines but which, when you read it, just don't make a lot of sense.

Website directories aren't designed to help the bride, except accidentally. Their main purpose is to generate income for the owners.

Hopefully, these suggestions will help make your web searches for wedding dresses in Louisville and surrounding areas more productive. Happy browsing!