There are some new rules of the road which you must understand in order to get the best out of the search engines and the results they deliver to you.

These key “need to know” concepts explain the landscape and define the structures of the content you see along the information superhighway.

Once you understand what you are seeing, you can place everything into a new perspective which helps you get to where you really want to go.

The five key elements are these:

Slice: A slice is what you do when you enter a key word at a search engine. You slice into the universe of knowledge and tell the search engine to bring back just what you told it to look for. The more words you enter, the narrower the slice becomes.

Snippets: Snippets are those brief descriptions of the results the search engine delivers to you. The search engines use algorithms to decide what you see. Some of them also allow you to control how much of what you see and how it is organized.

Blinks: A blink is what you think you know after reading the snippet.

Tweets: Tweets are the headlines which summarize and describe the content of the results or the snippet.

Dicing: This is what you do when you click one of the media source categories at the search engine to narrow the results to a certain type of content (News, Images, Videos, and more, depending on the search engine). Google and Bing also allow you to dice by time (all, last year, last month, last week, past 24 hours).

Now practice. Do a search and see if you can see each element in action.