Internet Search Tips by Monica Stoilov

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

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

Meta Engines Meta engines search many single engine’s databases. It does not return all “hits” but selects top “hits” from each site.

Search Techniques

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, don’t use “dogs” when you only want to find documents on “golden retrievers”.

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.

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

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:

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

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.**

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

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

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

NOTE: different search engines handle Boolean Expressions differently.

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.