529 College Savings Plans

How To Use Google To Find A College Savings Calculator

In this article I'm going to show you how to search for College Savings Calculators. To learn how to best utilize Google as your search engine can allow you to obtain exactly what you wish from the world. It's really quite easy to use, if you know how. In this article I'll be giving a little tutorial on the use of the Google Search engine and will show how it relates to finding just the College Savings 529 college fund Plan that you desire so as to fill in the money needs that your Grants (such as the Pell Grant) don't accomplish.

First, go to Google; you don't know how¡­ well, shame on you. You're going to search for "College Savings Calculators", so you need to use quotes around it. Type google.com into Internet Explorer's Address box, then press the ENTER or RETURN key.

Google's familiar box will appear. You can do everything from here, if you're good at using it; so, click in the box and type "College Savings Calculators", then click the SEARCH button. You'll notice that, as you typed, a list of words appeared with different variations of the letters you had typed. If it ever goes away, it means you spelled it wrong. In that case, just press the backspace key to see the list of choices again.

The reason that you put quotes around the words "College Savings Calculators" is, it will only show you web pages which containing all three words in a row just as you typed them, with spaces between them. If you didn't use the quotes, it would have given you pages where the word College was somewhere on the page, Savings on another part of the page and Calculators on yet another. We're interested in finding information on 529 savings accounts, and we'll first need to look at such searches as "college savings programs", "529 college fund" or "college savings calculator".

So, let's do it. I type "College Savings Calculator" into the box, press RETURN, and then pick a choice.

apps.collegeboard.com/fincalc/college_savings.jsp

It brings me to a very handy 'College Savings Calculator'. You'll notice that in the title bar it says the words 'College Savings Calculator', all together just like you typed it in Google. That, then, is the first place Google looks when you use quotes. Any page which has exactly the word sequence you typed between quotes will be displayed first in Google's listing if it finds perfect matches.

This is very important. It means that quotes can be very powerful when you're using Google. Do you think that, if someone puts exactly a certain word sequence in the Titlebar, and that will contain exactly what you're looking for? Well, yes, of course it will. Now, let's try looking for something else that's related, such as "college savings programs."

Beware of Google's top two or three listings; they've been paid-for by clients, so they might not contain what you need to know. They might be

If a webpage looks very simple, sometimes each webpage has a list of what are called 'Keywords' embedded inside them (more complex web pages generally don't). If you ever wish to look at what keywords are being used on a webpage, try doing a 'View' menu->Source from Internet Explorer's menus. This will bring up the program called 'Notepad', which will let you see what is called the HTML code of the webpage that you're currently on. Choose 'Format->Wordwrap' in Notepad so you can see the right-hand letters on the page. Do 'Edit->Find' and type Keywords in the box. If there are keywords on the page, it will show them. One of them might be "college Savings Programs". So, the SECOND place that Google looks is in the header's keyword section.

And third, Google then looks for multiple instances of the exact word sequence "college Savings Programs" inside the body of the text. The more times it finds that exact order, the more to the top of the page it will display that webpage (within restricted limits that Google places on web pages to keep people from forcing their pages to come to the top). So, when we type "College Savings Calculator" in a box, we get what Google has determined is the best choice for you.

If you have put quotes around the words, it WON'T list pages where the three words inside the quotes are separated around the page. You'd have to not use quotes to get those pages. Lets say that, this time, I type College Savings Calculator in the box without using quotes. Now you get a different list of words as you type than you did when you put the quote first. So, TRY IT BOTH WAYS. Try it WITH quotes and WITHOUT quotes.

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