The Internet is a wonderful way to pass the time, stay in touch with family and friends, shop, bank, plan vacations and find entertainment.
There is a lot of material on the Internet now – there are literally billions of websites available. This knowledge is more easily accessible thanks to search engines.
Keep in mind that the results you get from one search engine may not be the same as those from another. In reality, because of the way each search engine operates, they are often different. As a consequence, using more than one search engine on a regular basis could be advantageous. What kind of search engine you use would likely be determined by your needs.
Do not panic if you do not find what you are searching for the first time. Search engines are useful for finding knowledge on the Internet, but they are not great. To find what you are searching for, you will need to play with various search words.
Below are some top tips for searching:
- Quotation marks – surround keywords with quotation marks to obtain results matching an exact phrase g. “The Battle of Hastings”.
- Exclude words – use a minus symbol before an unwanted word or phrase to exclude it, e.g., pets -cats.
- Include words – similarly to the above you can use the + symbol to include those words in your results e.g. tall +and short. I have used this example as common terms are usually ignored. Some examples of stop words are: “a”, “and” “but”, “how” and “what”. While the majority of all Internet search engines utilise stop words, they do not prevent a user from using them, but they are ignored.
- Specify location – many search engines allow you to restrict searches to sites within a specific country or region (e.g., UK only). This often helps you find more relevant results when searching for local information or services.
- Specify date – restrict the results of a search to pages or files that were uploaded or changed within a specific time frame.
- Specify media – restrict your search to files of a specific type (g., images, videos, documents, etc.). If you are trying to source an image that needs to be a specific size, click on settings, advanced search then under image size you can select the size you require. It is also here you can search for the relevant file types.
- Drop the suffixes – it’s usually best to enter the base word so that you don’t exclude relevant pages. For example, birdand not birds, walk and not walked. One exception is if you are looking for sites that focus on the act of walking, enter the whole term walking.
- Browser history – many times, I will be researching an item and scanning through dozens of pages when I suddenly remember something I had originally dismissed as being irrelevant. How do you quickly go back to that website? You can try to remember the exact words used for the search and then scan the results for the right site, but there is an easier way. If you can remember the general date and time of the search you can look through the browser history to find the webpage.
Tip: don’t worry about capitalisation as most research engines do not distinguish between upper or lower case.
A tool is only as useful as the typing fingers wielding it, as the saying goes “garbage in, garbage out”. Search engines will try to place the most relevant results at the top of the list, but if your search terms are too broad or ambiguous, the results will not be helpful. It is your responsibility to learn how to make your searches both fast and effective.
The Internet is a great tool for those who know how to use it efficiently with a few basic tricks. Never underestimate the power of a skilled search expert!
