Charles Fleurie

SLM521

Summer 2005

 

Internet Search Tips

In this activity I will give you five tips on using various search engines to search the web. I will also provide examples of each.

1) Try different search engines. I used "search engine" on yahoo and on google. Below are the 1st five results returned by each page. As you can see they are quite different.

  1. -- Yahoo –

    2. 1— Effective Search Engine Marketing - $79

    2-- Submitter.net - Search Engine Submission

    3 -- News Results for search engines

    4 -- CNET Search.com

    5 -- Search Engine Watch: Tips About Internet Search Engines & Search Engine Submission

  2. – google –

1-- Search Engine Watch: Tips About Internet Search Engines & Search ...

2 -- AltaVista

3 -- Lycos Search

4 -- Google

 

2) Be as specific as you can. If you use the word "tickets" you will get something like this:

1 -- Front Row Tickets.com

2 -- Tickets
3 -- Official Ticketmaster site. Tickets for Concerts, Sports, Arts ...

But, if what you really want are tickets to a Ravens football game. Try this "Ravens football tickets" and this is what you will get:

1 -- Ravens Tickets
2 -- Ravens Tickets - Cheap

-- Baltimore Ravens Tickets - Ravens NFL Football - Ravens Ticket Brokers

 
  1. Try different spellings of what you want. (if applicable.)

I typed in "Bare tickets" and these links were returned:

1 -- Product search results for bare tickets

2 -- Bare tickets - Bare information - Chicago

3 -- Barenaked Ladies Tickets - Great Source for Bare Naked Ladies ...

Of course if you typed in "Bear tickets" something different would come up:

1 -- Chicago Bears Tickets : Bears Football Tickets @ BuySellTix

2 -- Chicago Bears Tickets - Bears NFL Football - Bears Ticket Brokers

3 -- Baylor Bears Tickets - NCAA College Football - Ticket Brokers


4) Some search engines will ignore common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results.

If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)

If a common word is essential to your search you can add quotation marks around the phrase ("one")

  1. If your search term has more than one meaning you can use a minus sign ("-") in front of words you do not want to be searched on.

Bass, for example, could refer to fishing or music. If you only want spots with the fish and do not want to look for music instances, use this phrase:

"Bass- music"