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Internet Search Tips
Search Engines are your main method of finding what you need on the Internet. Though several Engines may appear to be similar, search results may differ from one Engine to the next. When searching the Internet, be patient! Remember you are looking for a single topic among millions of possibilities. It is often necessary to use more than one Engine during a search.
Because each Search Engine works slightly different, look for Help or the About page on the site and review such pages as Web Search Tips, Help with Search and Advanced Search.
Defining the Search
Be Specific: If you are looking for Used Cars do not define search simply as cars. If you know the brand of car you want than define search as Used Volkswagen Cars.
Check Spelling: If you misspell a word in your criteria, the search results will be inaccurate Example: Used Volkswagen Cas.
Boolean Operators can be used to define a search in most search engines. These operators help in defining the search criteria further.
The criteria are not case-sensitive except the operators need to be capitalized.
Helpful Operators & Wildcard Characters:
• AND: Inserting the operator AND between two keywords or phrases will result in Web sites that include both keywords. Example: Used AND Cars tell the engine to search for pages with BOTH Used and Cars.
A plus sign (+) works similar to AND. Example: Used +Cars with no space after the + sign.
• OR: Inserting the operator OR between two keywords or phrases will result in Web sites with either or both of the keywords. Example: Volkswagen OR Toyota will look for sites with either or both Volkswagen or Toyota.
• AND NOT: Inserting the operator AND NOT will exclude a word from the results. Example: Volkswagen AND NOT Beetle will search for sites that include Volkswagen but not Beetle.
A minus sign (-) works similar to AND NOT. Example: Volkswagen –Beetle with no space after the – sign.
• Quotation Marks (“ ”) – quotation marks. Surrounding a phrase with quotation marks will result in a search for the exact phrase. Example: “Used Volkswagens”
• * – use to search for various forms of a word. Example: run* would result in pages containing running, runs, runners etc.
• Combination of operators will also work. Example: “Used Cars” + Ontario will result in pages containing the phrase Used Cars plus Ontario. This narrows the search to include only Ontario versus worldwide.
Words Engines Ignore
Most search engines ignore the following words: a, an, the, for, with, this, that, to as well as punctuation marks.
Exception Examples
The phrase To be or not to be will be result in a list of references from the play Shakespeare’s Hamlet versus Web sites that contain the text “To be” OR “not to be.”
A criteria of 12 * 6 will calculate the result of the formula versus using the * as a wildcard character in the search.
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Laura Noble is the owner of Noble Software Solutions – on-site customized software training specialists, located in London, Ontario. Laura can be contacted at 519.680.2689 or by email at lnoble@noblesoftwaresolutions.com. www.NobleSoftwareSolutions.com "We Make It Click."
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