How to search for Freelance Writing Jobs on the Net

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.”

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