Searching for What You Need
✓ CompletedA lot of VA work starts with "Can you find out…?" How to do something in a tool, a supplier's phone number, next month's public holidays. Computer & Laptop Basics covered searching for an error message. This lesson covers finding everything else.
From Question to Search
Type the words the answer is likely to contain, not your whole question. Name the tool or the company, what you want to do, and anything that makes it specific.
| You want to know | Weak search | Better search |
|---|---|---|
| How to add a signature in Gmail | email help | gmail add signature |
| How to save a Google Doc as a PDF | convert my file | google docs download as pdf |
| A supplier's opening hours | packaging supplier hours | Luntian Packaging opening hours |
| This year's holidays in the Philippines | holidays | Philippines regular holidays 2026 official |
If the results aren't right, change the words instead of scrolling further. Add a detail, such as the year, "computer" or "phone", or the country. Or take out a word that's pulling in the wrong results. Put quotation marks around words that must appear together exactly: "Luntian Packaging".
Picking a Result
Before you click, look at three things:
- Sponsored (or Ad): someone paid to put it there. It may be useful, but it's at the top because of the payment.
- The site: for how-to questions about a tool, the tool's own help pages are the best source. Gmail Help, for example, is on support.google.com. For a business, its own website.
- The date: tools change often. An answer from 2017 may describe buttons that aren't there anymore.
Some search engines now show an AI summary at the top. It's quick, but it can be wrong or out of date. Treat it as a hint: open the page it's based on and check the steps against your own screen.
When a few results look promising, open two or three in new tabs (right-click › Open link in new tab), compare them, and close the ones you don't need.
Finding a Company's Official Page
For a company's contact details, prices or hours, go to the company's own website and check that the web address matches the company's name. Directory sites and old social media posts are often out of date.
If the client already gave you the exact web address, type it in the address bar instead of searching for it, as you learned in Computer & Laptop Basics.
Kapag hindi mo mahanap sa unang subok, palitan mo ang mga salita. Mas mabilis 'yon kaysa mag-scroll hanggang page 5 ng results.
Find the Answer
Choose what you would search for, or which result you would open.
Grace asks you to keep the header row of a long Sheet visible while she scrolls. You search and get these results. Click the one you'd open first.
Grace wants to know Luntian Packaging's opening hours. Which search is most likely to get you the answer fastest?
You search zoom share screen. The steps in the results mention buttons you can't find on your laptop. What's the most likely reason?
You need the customer-service number of a courier called Swift Parcel PH. Which source do you trust most?
The AI summary at the top of your results gives clear steps for Grace's question. What do you do before you use them?
- Search with the words the answer contains: the tool or company, the action, and a detail.
- Change the words when results are wrong. Don't just scroll further.
- Prefer the tool's own help pages or the company's own site. Check for Sponsored labels and old dates.
- Use an AI summary as a hint, and check its source.