Basic Searching

The most important start to searching is choosing good keywords.

1. For example, if you want information about endangered Siberian tigers, don't enter the word tigers.
2. Many of your hits will be about sports teams with the name tiger.
3. Try Siberian tiger as a phrase search (in some search engines you will need to put Siberian tiger in quotation marks).
4. You can narrow your search further by adding the term endangered.
5. Try changing the order of your key words. Some search engines give stronger preference to the first word in a search.
6. If you get a lot of good hits, some pages allow you to search within these results.
7. Try searching for words in the title only. In AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos and Northern Light, put title:"Siberian Tiger" and they will search for titles with those two words together only. With Google use the search term allintitle:"Siberian Tiger".
8. Find out if the search engine pays attention to upper and lower case letters.
   • Using all lower case letters gives you the widest search.
   • It is better to use a capital letter to start if you are looking for a person's name, the title of a book, a place name, movie title, etc.
9. Check your spelling if you don't get any hits.

Before searching ask yourself these questions:

1. What exactly am I searching for? (a photograph, person, etc.)

2. Am I looking for something specific such as Celine Dion's baby? If so a search engine such as Google is best.

3. Am I looking for a general topic such as baseball? If so, a subject directory such as Yahoo is best. Note that Yahoo's search engine uses Google's technology.

4. Do I know how to use the search engine or subject directory I've chosen?