Q: What’s a question and answer search? A: It’s a powerful technique which delivers very specific results.
According to Living Internet, “Question and answer searching leverages the considerable power of phrases to get Internet search engines to return only results that match a multi-word string of characters. The longer the phrase, the fewer the matches and more specific the results.”
Living Internet offers further information and examples for using question and answer searches:
A typical question phrase would be “who invented physics”, and a typical answer phrase would be “logic was invented by”.
Either questions or answers can return good results, although question phrases tend to return information written more in a tutorial mode since explanations are often prefaced with their question, and questions on messages boards, list archives, and Usenet newsgroups have often already been answered by others — a phenomenon which created the Frequently Asked Questions.
Whether using a question or answer query, try to find as specific a wording as possible to filter the results down to just the pages with the information you are looking for. If the phrase is actually too specific and there are no results, then try different and looser wording until you get some matches. A few example searches are listed below:
Questions Answers “how do magnets work” “magnets work by” “what is a spark plug” “spark plugs work” “how far is a light year” “a light year is” “how to build a deck” “building a deck” “how to grow tomatoes” “growing tomatoes”
