The Internet: Search Strategies

Searching for a phrase.  Enclose any phrase of two words or more within quotation marks to limit the search to that exact sequence of words. If the search engine you're using doesn't specify phrase searching, it will usually provide sites that contain your search terms anywhere and in any order.

Examples:
"food and drug administration"

“New York Times"

Searching by Truncation.  Some engines allow you to search for all variants of a word by entering the word stem followed by a truncation indicator.

Example:
"fem*" retrieves female, females, feminine, feminist, feminists, feminism

Using Boolean Operators.  Boolean expressions allow you to combine and exclude words or phrases in your results.

To require a term to be present in your results, put a plus (+) immediately before it or use the Boolean operator "and."

Examples :
+Scotland +golf
Scotland AND golf

To search for documents containing any of your search terms, you can either simply list them or put the Boolean operator "or" between each one.

Examples :
jazz swing
jazz OR swing

To exclude a term from your search results, put a minus immediately before it or use the Boolean operator "not."

Examples:
sharks -card
sharks NOT card

Clustering.  In order to present a wider range of web sites on the first screens, some search engines group all results that come from a single web site together, displaying only one of them in the results listing. You can view the other relevant pages from that search site by clicking on "More from this site" or a similar message.

Finding similar pages.  Some engines allow you to search for other pages similar to those retrieved by your search. You can utilize this feature by clicking on "More like this" or a similar message.

There are three main ways to find information on the World Wide Web.

1.      URL’s (uniform resource locators) -- search by address

2.      Web Directories (also known as “subject indexes”) -- search by subject

3.      Search Engines -- search by keyword

URLs are like addresses of web pages. A “domain name,” or ending of a web site, locates an organization or other entity on the Internet. The types of domain names are listed below.