Search Tips

Popular internet search engines are designed to help you locate businesses, people, webpages, newsgroups, usenets, software, etc.

Each one has unique features to help you search for information. Most offer more than one way to locate the information you are seeking. Experiment until you find the one(s) that you are comfortable using.

NOTE: Each utility has it own database, so the results from one utility will not be the same as another.

When you perform a standard 1 or 2 term search with any of the search utilities, you can easily find a hundred-thousand matches!

There are a number of ways to improve your searches.

• Look for an ADVANCED OPTIONS button on the search page. This will allow you to use the search utilities' best features and strengths to your advantage.

• Some search utilities divide the WWW into categories. This will narrow your search to only those subject areas.

• Other utilities do Site Reviews or offer Weekly-Monthly Highlighted Sites.

• '...and now for something completely different...', if you don't mind dead links or what could be possible objectionable material, spin the roulette wheel at 'Webcrawler', and randomly find sites.

• Once I get there, What Do I Type?

  Boolean Operators (AND | OR | NOT) let you combine terms that define what you are trying to find.
  They must be in CAPITAL letters and have a SPACE before and after. You can combine as many terms and operators as possible to narrow your search.

  Example: restaurant AND Lorain AND Ohio AND italian OR mexican

  You can also use NOT to eliminate terms that might match, but you know you do not want.

  Example: biography AND millionaires NOT Getty

  Some site have additional boolean operators:
  ADJ - adjacent words
  NEARnn - words seperated by less than nn words.
  Note: Some engines use + or - signs instead of the words AND or NOT.

Using boolean is not necessary with the search engines that accept phrases. To enter an entire phrase, put it inside quotes ("). More of the web search engines are beginning to use a phrase type of search entry, and getting smarter.

Hopefully this information will help keep your search matches under six figures.

For a list of search engines, check out the one of these pages

• Site or Web Search Page
• Access Page to Main Web Search Engines
• or Original Search Engine Access Page