Searching on the Net

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Simplify Searches

If your searches are sometimes unsuccessful, try these hints:

*Start with broad general terms.

*If broad terms yield too many responses, try a more specific one.

*If your keywords produce no results, use synonyms.

*Make sure the search engine isn't case-sensitive (that is, make sure it doesn't care if you search using upper- or lowercase letters).

*Use wild cards. For example if you were searching for items connected to John Kennedy, you would want to do use search terms like "Kennedy*", which could get you KennedyCenter, KennedyAirport, and so forth. The asterisk acts as a kind of vacuum, sucking in every possible term or topic related to Kennedy.

*Finally, check the About or Help information at every search engine's Web site for site-specific details and hints on how to improve your searches using their individual search scheme.

Search Tips

  1. Cluster words together in your search query.
    The search engine can evaluate context by looking for the proximity of terms within a document. Use this to your advantage by searching on words that you might see clustered together in the type of document you're trying to find. In an article about Microsoft's customer service, for example, you would expect to see the words "customer", "service" and "Microsoft" in close proximity to one another.
  2. Use special modifiers to refine your search query.
    Using the character + (plus) before a word tells the search engine that this word must appear in a document. You can think of this as the "require" term modifier. Don't insert a space between the modifier/sign and the word, although do insert a space before any preceding word and the subsequent + (plus).
    Example: (HTML +dynamic) translates to "find me any document in which the word 'HTML' appears along with the word 'dynamic'."
  3. Using the character - (minus) before a word tells the search engine to exclude from its results any document that contains that word. You can think of this as the "exclude" term modifier. Don't insert a space between the modifier/sign and the word, although do insert a space before any preceding word and the subsequent - (minus).
    Example: (Microsoft -DOJ -Department -Justice) tells the search engine "find me anything with 'Microsoft' in it, but not 'DOJ' or 'Department' or 'Justice.'"
  4. The character * (asterisk) will act as a wild card when you know only part of a word, or are not sure of the exact spelling of a product, company, person, or subject.
    Example: (mother*) will bring back documents that contain words or phrases such as motherboard and motherhood.
  5. If at first you don't succeed, try being more specific by changing your search terms.
  6. Boolean searches: Use AND or OR.

A friend told me to watch out for "stop words" when searching on the Net. What is a Stop word?

Stop words are words such as "and," "the," and "or," which search engines exclude from their searches to make them more effective. They are excluded because they are either extremely common or they are used by the search engine for performing more specialized searches. When you think about how many documents on the Web contain the word "the," stop words begin to make sense.

If you really do want to search for one of these terms, there's an easy way to work around stop words. By bracketing words in quotation marks, search engines will look for every word inside the quotes, in the sequence you specify. Thus, if you wanted to look for sites about the 1980s crime drama "Cagney and Lacey," you would want to search for

"Cagney and Lacey"

not

Cagney and Lacey

Searching with quotes prevents you from ending up with documents about the star of Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Heat (James Cagney), not to mention Lacey-Walsh Carpet and Tile Co., Lacey's Spring, Alabama, and Lacey Seelinger, "a white Devonshire Rex cat living in West Virginia."

When using a search engine, how do I make the search more specific ?

You'll always get better search results if you define what you're searching for more closely. The two easiest ways to narrow your search are by adding and subtracting terms from your search string. (Note: we used Yahoo! for our examples here, but these techniques will work for almost all search engines.)

Let's say I wanted to find out more about the government's conspiracy to hush up its autopsy of a captured alien. If I search Yahoo! for "conspiracies," I get back "22 Site Matches." However, I can focus it a little more by adding another search word. Just typing in the word itself isn't good enough, though. In order to only return sites that contain both words, I have to use the word "and" to link them. If I search for "conspiracies and aliens" I get 3 matches -- one of which is "UFO Files" from the "50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time," which, it turns out, has exactly what I wanted on the mysterious cover-up.

If adding search items doesn't cut down the field enough, try going negative -- telling the search engine what not to look for. If I'm looking for business opportunities and search for "business and opportunity," I get swamped by more than 500 items on Yahoo!, most of which are Amway-type, multilevel marketing schemes (commonly known as "MLMs"). I can narrow my search by asking for these items to be excluded. In this case, I use the word "not" instead of "and." If I query again, but this time search on "business and opportunity not mlm," I receive just one item back.

A third way to define your search more closely is to put your search term in quotes. That tells the search engine that you're looking for exactly those words in exactly that order. For instance, if I search for Charles Pappas (my name), Yahoo! overwhelms me with 13,000 items, including some poetry from a Tom Pappas and some information on the Charles Taylor "Master Mechanic Award," for which George Pappas was nominated. But if I enter "Charles Pappas" in quotes, Yahoo! snags only the items with the words "Charles" and "Pappas" appearing together in the correct order. In this case, just two dozen items qualified, many of which are actually about me, including my highbrow musings on A Very Brady Sequel.

Don't want to have to remember all these surfing tips? Most search engines have an "advanced options" menu that lets you tick off the specific ways you want to search using a form. Also, many search engines offer specific instructions on how to make the most of your search on their site.

Search Engine Help:

  • Google
  • Yahoo!
  • Alta Vista
  • Excite
  • HotBot
  • InfoSeek
  • Webcrawler

I like using the search engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista, but the number of hits I get back is waaaaaay too many for me to handle. Are there special search engines that handle just my interests?

Search for information on the Web long enough, and eventually you realize that usually the biggest difficulty is not having too little information, but too much. Specialized search engines help with this problem by letting you narrow the field before you even enter your search terms.

Start by investigating 100 Specialized Search Engines ( . Its eclectic mix includes everything from the 80s Search ("looks exclusively for information related to the 1980s!"), to AquaLink ("Web's largest aquaria resource"), to the Complete Gardener Encyclopedia ("searchable index of almost 3,000 plant species"), to "Search Shakespeare" (take a guess).

If you're feeling frivolous, Search Engines -- Beaucoup ( ) ("The exceptional way to search," according to the exceptionally modest owners) serves up databases devoted to hunting down info about Turkey, Rhyming, Bach -- and even James T. Kirk ("seeks out content where no search engine has ever gone").

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