Search Tips

  1. Be as specific as possible

The first and most obvious of tips is to be as specific as possible.  The more specific you are with your search entry the better results you’ll get.  For example, if you were trying to find out information on the Washington Redskins, which just happens to be the greatest football team of all time.  Now, if you simply put in Washington Redskins, you will get information about the team, but you’ll also get information about Washington D.C. and Indians.  If instead you include the word football or NFL, then you’ll get results that are much more specific to the Washington Redskins football team.

 

  1. Include only the necessary terms

Many times when students or anyone is searching for something and they are using a long sentence to search with, they end up getting results that have nothing to do with what they were looking for.  The reason for this is that the search engines look for any of the words, so when words like “to” or “by” are used then any site that has those words will show up in the results.  For example, writing lyrics to songs by Outkast will produce results that may have nothing to do with Outkast or their songs.  Instead, remove the words to and by and simply write lyrics songs Outkast and it will produce only results for those terms.

 

  1. + and – keys

Using +s and –s works great when searching for something specific.  You’ll see thing similar in many search engine sites where they let you do advanced searches and have multiple slots with key terms like and or not available.  Most people don’t realize that you can do this in regular searches as well by simply including the + or – keys.  For example, going back to the Washington Redskins if you wrote Washington Redskins football, it would still provide results on Washington D.C.  If you included the + keys and wrote Washington + Redskins + football, then it would only include results for Washington Redskins football.  Also, if you wrote Washington + Redskins – Washington D.C., then it would remove all results on Washington D.C. from your search.

 

  1. Quotations

Quotations are another great tool for searching, especially when looking for books, articles, poems, songs or any other piece of work with a specific title.  Without the quotations, if you searched for information on Aerosmith’s, “Love in an Elevator” you would gets lots of results on love and results on elevators, but probably not much on the song.  If instead you write the song in quotations then the only results will be on the song or the band.

 

  1. Good search engines

The last tip that I have for students struggling with trying to search for information on the Internet is to find good search engines.  If you have ever used a bad search engine and a good search engine then you know what I am talking about.  The difference in quality of results is astronomical.  The only way to discover which ones are good and which ones aren’t is to try them out.  Until then, a couple of good ones that I know of are www.google.com and www.yahoo.com.