There are millions and millions of webpages out there. However, as most of us have troubles finding

1

• There are millions and millions of webpages out
  there. However, as most of us have troubles
  finding an old letter on our own computer, how
  can we find relevant information on this "global
  hard drive"?

2

• Search engines are -- well -- "engines" or
  "robots" that crawl the Web looking for new
  webpages. These robots read the webpages and put
  the text (or parts of the text) into a large
  database or index that you may access. None of
  them cover the whole Net, but some of them are
  quite large

3

• The major players in this field are Google,
  Yahoo! Search (which is not the same as the
  Yahoo! Directory), MSN Search and Ask.

4

• You're hungry. You go into a restaurant, sit down
  by the table and wait for the waiter. The waiter
  arrives, coughs politely, and asks "What do you
  want for dinner, sir?" or "What would you like
  today, madam?" "Food," you answer, "food".

5

• Your average search engine is not that
  understanding. A search for food in Google brings
  up some 607 million webpages. 607 million pages
  are just too many to stomach. And, no, the search
  engine does not try to find out what you're
  really looking for.

6

• So, what do you do? You refine your question. You
  become more specific. You provide more
  information.
• "I would like a pizza with pepperoni and ham, but
  with no olives and no garlic."

7

• Here's how your order will look using Boolean
  operators
• pizza AND pepperoni AND ham AND NOT olives AND
  NOT garlic.

8

• If you suspect that the restaurant is out of
  pepperoni, you may be a little more open-minded
  about this, and say "I would like pepperoni or
  chicken".
• In Boolean terms that is
• pepperoni OR chicken

9

• What happens if you take out the operators AND,
  AND NOT and OR and write the following line
  instead?
• pizza pepperoni ham olives garlic
• Most search engines interpret the space between
  the words as AND.

10

• Search engines are useful, but they are extremely
  stupid.
• If you ask them for a pan pizza they may not only
  give you pages on pizza and pan pizza, but also
  information about the god Pan, Pan flutes, frying
  pans, Peter Pan, Pan Arabian co-operation and
  more.

11

• You need a way of telling the search engine that
  pan pizza is an expression or a phrase. For this
  you use double quotation marks "...", like this
• "pan pizza" AND "Italian pepperoni" AND "black
  olives"
• This will tell the search engine to look for
  pages that include the text string pan pizza, not
  the word pan in general.

12

• You could use the NEAR search operator. NEAR
  means "show me pages where these words are near
  each other".
• Thomas NEAR Edison
• How near is NEAR? That depends. In AltaVista the
  words used to be less than 10 words apart.
• dogs near/3 cats
• finds documents in which dog and cat occur within
  three words of each other, in either order."
• By altering the number, you can decide how far
  apart the keyword can be in order to be included
  in the results.

13

• http//www.pandia.com/goalgetter/6.html