How do you search for information on the web?

The web contains millions of documents and thousands are added or changed every day. You know the Internet is a great resource for information, but how do you find what you are looking for? The answer is: search engines.

Search engines are web sites that allow you to do key word searches across the Internet. You can go to one of these sites, type in a few key words, and they will return a list of pages (or URL's) that match the key words you entered.

Some of the more popular search engines are:

AltaVista Excite Yahoo Lycos

The first time you use a search engine you might be surprised by the number of matches that are returned even when you enter what seems to be precise key words. For example, italian restaurants kansas city matches 274,135 web pages at AltaVista.

To use search engines effectively you should know how to enter key words in a way that will focus your search and reduce the number of unrelated documents that are matched. Every search engine has a different set of rules for refining a search, but there are some techniques that apply to most:

Use quote marks "". If you want to look for web pages that contain two or more words together, put quotes around them. ie "kansas city"
Use + and - to include or exclude words. For example, italian restaurant matches all documents that have either the word italian, the word restaurant, or both words. If you enter +italian +restaurant it will match only documents that contain both words.

Let's apply these two simple rules above to our example search. This time we search for +italian +restaurants +"kansas city" and get back 7,465 matches. Still a lot of documents to search through on an empty stomach, but the results are listed in order with the best matches first.

Tip!: Search engines return a list of URLs and a few key words from each URL. Before you explore a URL check the domain name. Is it a domain name for a machine that is likely to have the information you are looking for? Looking at the results from our example search above www.pastasauces.com seemed like a site I could safely ignore, while kansascityguide.com seemed like just the site that would have the information I was looking for.