From 3.5 million TechNet Search Results to 9 in Four Easy Steps

TechNet and search.

Hey, we know you mostly use Google to look for things on TechNet and hit the back button to go back to Google if you didnt' find what you were looking for, and that you do this over and over and over until you find what you're looking for. It's not very efficient, is it?

The next time you're looking for something on TechNet, try our site search. It's much improved lately as we've increased our index coverage and dramatically increased search keywords.

Here, I'll show you how to go from over 3.5 million search results to 9 without ever having to leave the site.

Start with the search box, which you'll find in the upper right-hand corner of every page on TechNet (and MSDN):

Now let's type in a pretty generic search term, "Windows Server". Notice all of the pre-populated search keywords that appear. We now have over 2 million and we will continue to add more as we analyze search phrase traffic patterns. This should help you quite a bit in forming your search query:

Let's stick with our generic search term for the time being and just hit Enter to see our search results:

Over 3.5 million - which isn't very helpful. But, you'll see that we have links allow you to refine the search results by topic and source. They're like adding additonal search terms without having to type them in. Let's click on the refinements by topic for "Windows Server 2008", "Windows Server", "Windows 2000 Server" and the source refinement for "Support: Knowledge Base & Forums".

That made a huge difference - we're down to 47 results:

Now, let's add one more keyword to our search string, "downloads", and see what we get:

Nine (9) results without ever leaving TechNet!

Sharp-eyed readers will also note the RSS badge on every search results page - you can subscribe to search results, and your RSS reader will deliver up new items as they get indexed and added. This is a great way to stay on top of a particular product or technology.

The next time you need to search our site, try using our search keywords with search refinements - you might just find what you were looking for much faster than bouncing in and out of the site.

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