Updated April 11, 2015.

Most people are familiar with searching for products they want to buy in Google's search engine. But did you know that the default engine Google uses to return your search results is its general web search? This means that it's initial list of results is a mix of everything from news articles, online stores, reference materials, companies, organizations, and so much more.

But if you are in fact searching for medical supplies online for shopping rather than just research, you can get a more direct and complete list of results by clicking on Google's "Shopping" header after you've entered your search term.

The Shopping engine will return actual products with pricing, picture, and a brief description. In contrast to the Web engine where you will find links to different online medical supply companies, the Shopping engine provides you with a list of actual products. Click on the product, and you'll be taken to the online store.

Sorting Your Results

Searching this way also gives you the power to sort your results in a more useful way as a shopper. For example, you can display the results in either a list format or a grid format. Grid view fits more products on a single page, with a picture and a price, but List view is able to fit a little more of a description alongside the product listing.

You can also sort the product list by review scores. Review scores are scores, usually a "star rating" system that most people inherently understand, that other shoppers who have already bought the specific item awarded them. Want to see the highest-rated items? You can sort the search results that way to begin your shopping with the products that have earned other shoppers' approval.

You can also sort by price: Low to High, or High to Low. If budget is an issue for you, you can start with the Low to High price sort because it will give you the least expensive items at the top of your list. If you find your list shows a lot of items that don't meet your standards for quality, sorting by high to low price might make more sense because you'll probably be getting better quality items with more features at the top of your list. But note that I wrote "probably." High cost does not always equate to high quality.

Since Google usually knows where you're searching from, you can check off a sort box on the left side of your screen that returns only results "near me," which is to say, results where the items can be found in your local vicinity. (Learn more about Google search tips from About.com's Web Search Expert.)

You can check off a box so that only "new items" are returned in your results list too.

What if you want to get specific with your budget range and only see a list of results that fall into a specific price range? You can do that too. For example, there will be a list of checkboxes that you can click so that they only show the items in the range that you set.

There are sort options to help you drill down into a large results list and get more specific results. You can select parameters by category, brand, and by seller.

Once you've tried different ways to sort your search you'll find what works for you. You'll probably want to try different sorts on the same search to see how Google carves up the results for you. This may highlight some things that you may not have seen in your original search.