Can You Google "Dell Inspirion laptop" for me?

I get a lot of these kind of requests, actually, and almost always they can be answered by using Google or another search engine of your choice. It's amazing: it's faster for you to actually do the Google search than for you to send me the question.

My conclusion about why I get these sort of questions is because people aren't too comfortable using Google for more complex searches, so my answer will talk about how to do just this type of search rather than just give you the answer, which is "yes".

First off, open up another window with Google search. Got it? Great! Resize this window and that window so you can see both at the same time. Should be pretty easy, though if you're on Windows and these windows are maximized (they take up the entire screen), then you'll need to click on the middle of the three buttons on the top right, the one that has two little overlapping boxes within it, which will make the window shrink down just a bit and let you resize it.

Your first attempt at a search might be to just look for dell inspirion laptop 5150, so try that. 2100 matches and a note "did you mean dell inspiron laptop 5150?" In fact, the laptop series doesn't have that last 'i' so clicking on that reveals that there are 56,100 matches for dell inspiron laptop 5150. Too many.

Okay, now let's try typing in the entire search phrase as a question because, well, because we can. Type in does anyone make a car charger for DELL Inspiron laptop 5150 and Google informs you that it's ignoring "a" and "for" as being too common. The result, 213 matches. A quick skim of the top ten and there's nothing that appears to be too exciting, except for one of the paid adverts at the top, which indicates:

      Laptop Car & Air Adapters -- Fast Shipping & Great Prices
      for Dell, Compaq, IBM, HP and Others -- www.shoplaptop.net

Definitely worth clicking on and visiting, but let's stick with Google to try a slightly more sophisticated search first. The key to improving our search results is to throw out the words we don't really care about (the "does anyone make") because a company that does make car chargers isn't going to have that specific question on their site any more than I have "does anyone answer questions about Dell laptops" on my own site!

But don't type in the search yet because here's a power Google search tip: if you surround a couple of words with quotes, Google will only show you exact matches. Search for car charger and it'll match "I lost my charger in my car" but search for "car charger" and it'll only match pages that have that specific phrase.

Now, finally, a search worthy of the Google Gods: "car charger" dell inspiron laptop 5150, which produces 3,370 matches of which just about all of the top ten matches are exactly what we seek, from "High Reliability Auto to Laptop DC/DC Converter for Dell" to "Connecting laptop to car stereo" (alright, that might be a bit off, but still worth reading) to "Dell AC adapter external power supply and car cords".

The key with using Google is to refine your searches if you're not finding what you want. Rather than step through page after page of results, just work on trying to narrow and narrow and narrow down your results until the vast majority of them are exactly what you seek. Then start looking at individual pages and you'll have much better results.

Hope that helps you out, and good luck with that car charger too!