What's Happening In Bedford? Searching for Bedford, MA

For no other reason other than we thought it might be fun, we’ve created this column to post some things going on in other Bedfords around the world, but what about those times you are searching for things just in this Bedford?

Some Google search tools might help you refine your results:

In Google (and most other search engines) use quotation marks to search for exact phrases.

Everything inside the quotes must show up together and next to each other in the order specified on a website to show up in the top finds of the search results.

Google will tend to ignore capitalization and most punctuation or other special characters that aren’t a part of the search qualifiers.

What that means is you’ll likely want “bedford ma” in your search bar (include the quotes).

When would we not want “bedford ma” in quotes to find something in town? Google can generally tell when you are searching for a state name. So if you are not using the quotation marks to be more inclusive of pages that might not specifically have Bedford MA next to each other, you can use Massachusetts or MA fairly interchangeably. If you are using quotation marks with “Bedford ma” and a website only has “Bedford Massachusetts” on their page, the page won’t show up at the top of the search results.

Use the minus sign (and no space after) to take out words or phrases you don’t want to show up in the search results.

Let’s say we are looking for a new restaurant in Bedford. That means we want to take out New Bedford, Ma in our results. We can do that using –“ (minus sign) -“new bedford”. As long as the restaurant doesn’t have the phrase Visit our new Bedford, MA restaurant we’re eliminating some of the businesses just to our South.

Those two tips should help, but here is one more:

We can use the site: feature to designate the site that we do want results from(site:thebedfordcitizen.org) or do not (-site:pinterest.com)
Just use the word site, colon, and the URL of the site you want to search on with no spaces. If you want a website excluded from your search (pinterest and facebook tend to work their way up my unwanted results), use the minus sign before site: (again no spaces between the minus sign, site, colon, and URL).