Catherine Johnson

22 October 2005

Elective Activity –Utilities –Search Tips

Five Search Engine Tips

*Don’t just put spaces in between words, put a + (plus-sign) instead, or “and”

For example, if I wanted to search for myself on Google, I might enter:

Catherine+Johnson+violin+music

Or Catherine Johnson and violin and music

* When you are searching for something, if you don’t get any results, or any good results, try using different adjectives, and re-arranging the words around. Improving your searches by using more words - the more words you use, the more accurate your search results will be. For example, if you are looking for “violin makers” you might get better results if you typed in “Violin Makers and Dealers in Baltimore, MD” (with the appropriate + marks in between).

* Just because you get 1 million hits (results from a search) doesn’t mean you have to scroll through all of them. Narrow your search, or only look at the first page of results, as they will be more of an exact match than the last pages.

For example, if you type in “Plants” at Yahoo.com, you get 171,000,000 results. It’s time to narrow the search a little for a more specific plant, or where you can buy planets, etc., such as “Where can I buy seeds for a pine tree?” or “Information about tulips.”

*If you don’t like your results on one engine, try somewhere else! Start with a good, general search engine, such as Google, then if you have to, switch.

For example, I like Askjeeves.com’s answer to “Where can I find a doctor” better than Google.

*If you want to search for a specific term, phrase, or quote, enclose the words in parentheses like “this.”

Then search.