Using Search Engines Effectively
Other People Are Reading
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Be Specific
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Search engines are a great way to find the information you're looking for on the Internet. But unless you have lots of time to sift through endless pages of text and html coding, you need to be very specific when entering search parameters.
Stay away from "stop" words--small words like "to," "a," "an," "the", "be" that most search engines consider inconsequential when scanning for a topic. Instead, use nouns and verbs that are specific to your search only, such as "learning ski," "eating restaurants travel guide," "cheap gas local guide." If any of these words are necessary to find information on what you're looking for, surround them with quotation marks so that the search engine knows to look for the specific words in the specific order you typed. An example of this would be the phrase "To be or not to be," a quotation from Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Without the quotation marks, a search engine might be at a loss as to what you were looking for. When you add the quotes, it knows to search for pages that contain the exact quote or the sequence of words.
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Use Relevant Key Words
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Use keywords that are relevant to the topic you are searching. If you're looking for information on romance novels, enter "romance + novels," or "romance novels" to get results. If looking for information on romance novels written in the early 20th century in France, enter something like "romance + novels + France + early 20th century" or "early 20th century romance novels + France."
Use Advanced Search Options
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Use available advanced search options or boolean clauses to refine your search parameters. For example, if you wanted to search for information on how to recover from strokes, you might want to use the boolean "not" to eliminate Web pages that deal with golf or swimming strokes, and you may wish to specify that only the pages that deal with "strokes" AND "recovery" should be searched. Boolean operators "and," "or," "not," "near" and "followed by" will help you to pinpoint your search.
Relevance
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Using keywords that have multiple meanings will make it more difficult for your search engine to return relevant results. If your keyword is likely to turn up pages that have nothing to do with what you're interested in finding out about, try qualifying the search parameters by adding specificity. If you're searching for information on the Bill of Rights, and you use the keyword "Bill," you'll get hits on every page that uses the name Bill frequently. To qualify your keyword search, add the word "Rights," or another word that will help your search engine target the correct results.
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Resources
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