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Searching for Information on the Internet

You know that there are millions of pages out on the World Wide Web full of information, but you may be asking yourself "How do I find what I'm looking for?" Fortunately, help is at hand with powerful tools such as search engines and search directories.

But what is a search engine or directory anyway? Both are a type of Web site that help you find the information you are after. Let's take a look at search engines first:

Search Engines

Search engines such as Google, Alta Vista and Lycos search for information through the use of keywords. The search engine then compares the words you have typed in with the documents stored in its database of Web pages and returns a list of pages that match.

You'll need to consider the words you use for a search. A search for just the word "fishing" for example, will return hundreds - if not thousands - of results that may or may not lead you to the information you require.

Adding more keywords will narrow down your search, resulting in more accurate results. For example, if you wanted to know about fishing on the River Loughor, you should use the keywords "fishing on the River Loughor" which should result in a list of Web pages that refer to both fishing AND the River Loughor.

When you receive the results of your search, it's worth mentioning that the first site listed isn't necessarily the best - or worst, for that matter. Expect to do a little comparison and some exploration of the results you receive.

You can vastly improve the accuracy of results if you use keyword search operators, which are used by a number of search engines. Below you'll see how a search can be refined and made more accurate by the use of phrases and keyword search operators: 

Keyword:
rugby
This will return thousands of results, including pages on rugby union, rugby league and the town of Rugby in Warwickshire. You're likely to have to wade through hundreds of pages to find the information you want. 

Keywords:
"rugby union"
Notice the use of quotation marks - this ensures that the search engine treats the keywords as a phrase, so that your results will be relevant to rugby union. What would happen if you didn't include the quotation marks? Then the search engine would treat rugby union as two separate keywords - so it would look for pages on rugby AND union, resulting in even more irrelevant pages. 

Keywords:
"rugby union" +Neil Jenkins
As well as placing rugby union within quotation marks as before, we've now refined our search to include a specific player - in this example Neil Jenkins. Note the use of the plus (+) symbol immediately before Neil's name with no gap between them. Also, there's no need to put names in quotation marks, but do remember to use capital letters for the first letter of their first and second names. So in this case we're asking the search engine for pages that contain information on not just rugby union, but both rugby union AND Neil Jenkins. 

Keywords:
"world cup" +"rugby union" -football
As well as using the plus (+) symbol, we can also use the minus (-) symbol to further refine a search. Look at the above keywords, we've asked the search engine to look for pages with information on the World Cup AND rugby union, but NOT football. The minus symbol should ensure that you only receive returns on pages containing information on the rugby World Cup but not the thousands of pages that probably exist on the football World Cup.

Search engines contain massive databases of information, but their very strength is also their downfall as they can often supply you with too many returns, or returns that are irrelevant. When that happens, try a subject directory.

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