Internet Search Tips by Monica Stoilov

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Internet Search Tipsby Monica Stoilov
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Pre-search Considerations

• What do I want to do?
• Browse all available types of topics
• Find a specific piece of information
• Find everything I can on a topic

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Search Engines

• . Engines search their database with on or more
  of the following
•         Title searches title of page entered
  by designer/creator
•         Description (metatags) summary of web
  page entered by designer/creator
•         Keywords that the creator has listed
  as pertinent to their page.
•         Body viewable text content of entire
  document

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Meta Engines

• Meta engines search many single engines
  databases. It does not return all hits but
  selects top hits from each site.

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Search Techniques
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Keywords

• Be as specific as possible when entering
  keywords. The more specific your request is, the
  less documents will be returned for you to
  browse. For example, dont use dogs when you
  only want to find documents on golden
  retrievers.

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Phrases

• It is more efficient when using two or more words
  to put these inside quotes. For example golden
  retrievers would return only those documents on
  this specific breed of dogs. No documents will
  appear with just the word golden or just the
  word retriever. The engine will search the words
  within the quotes exactly as they appear.
  Therefore it is not appropriate to use
  retrievers golden as this will not produce the
  same results.

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Wildcards

• The use of wildcards extends your search
  capabilities. For instance, educat will produce
  results of
• educate
• educated
• education
• educational, etc.

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Boolean Expressions

• Boolean operators include or exclude pieces of
  information that are grouped. They help to
  narrow or broaden a search. With billions of
  documents on the internet, the narrower your
  search, the faster you will find what you are
  looking for. The following are the most common
  Boolean Operators

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AND

• Links two or more words
• education AND elementary
• This operator will return documents with only
  both keywords present in the
• text.

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OR

• Broadens search to include more than one topic
• (education OR elementary)
• This operator will return all documents with
  education, elementary or both
• keywords included in the text.
• The OR operator should be placed inside
  parentheses.

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AND NOT/ NOT

• Limits search by returning only the first keyword
  and excludes any that may contain the second word
  even if the first word appears in the document.
  For example
• education AND NOT elementary

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• /- Works the same as AND/AND NOT. It adds or
  subtracts words in the
• search.

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• Boolean operators should be capitals. Most
  search engines will not recognize it as such
  unless it is in capitals.

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• NOTE different search engines handle Boolean
  Expressions differently.

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Embedding

• You can place more than one Boolean operator in a
  keyword search. For instance
• education AND (elementary OR secondary)
• will narrow your search even further.