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When
searching the Internet, be patient! Remember you are looking for a single topic
among millions of possibilities.
Search Engines
Search
engines are the main method of finding what you need on the Internet. Though
several engines may appear to be similar, the search results may differ from one
engine to the next. It is often necessary to use more than one engine during a
search.
Because
each search engine works slightly different, read the About page on the
site and review such pages as Search Tips, Advanced Search and
Help.
Defining
the Search:
BE SPECIFIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you are
looking for Used Cars do not define search simply as cars.
If you know the brand of car you want than define search as Used Volkswagen
Cars.
Check SPELLING! If you misspell a word in your
criteria the search will be inaccurate. Example: Used Volkswagen Cas.
Boolean Operators
can be used to define a search in most search engines. These operators help in
defining the search criteria further.
The
criteria are not case-sensitive, though it is convenient to capitalize operators
to separate them from the keywords etc.
Helpful Operators:
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AND:
Inserting the operator AND between two keywords or phrases will
result in web sites that include both keywords. Example: Used AND Cars
tell the engine to search for pages with BOTH Used and
Cars.
A plus sign (+) works similar to AND. Example:
Used +Cars
with no space after the + sign.
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OR:
Inserting the operator OR between two keywords or phrases will result
in web sites with either or both of the keywords. Example: Volkswagen OR
Toyota will look for sites with either or both Volkswagen or
Toyota.
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AND
NOT: Inserting the operator AND
NOT will exclude a word from the results. Example: Volkswagen AND NOT
Beetle will search for sites that include Volkswagen but not
Beetle.
A minus sign (-) works similar to AND NOT. Example:
Volkswagen –Beetle
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NEAR:
This operator allows you to specify how many words separate terms specified.
The default is 10. Example: Volkswagen NEAR Jetta or Volkswagen N4
Jetta would search for pages containing the words Volkswagen and
Jetta
within 4 words of each other.
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Quotation Marks (" "): Surrounding a
phrase with quotation marks will result in a search for the exact phrase.
Example: "Used Volkswagens".
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* - use to search for various forms of a word. Example:
run* would
result in pages containing running, runs, runners etc.
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Combination of operators will also work. Example:
“Used Cars” + Ontario
will result in pages containing the phrase Used Cars plus
Ontario.
This narrows the search to include only Ontario versus worldwide.
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To use
operators such as AND, OR in a keyword phrase and not
be treated as an operator enclose in single quotes. Example:
Lennon
‘and’ McCartney.
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To find a
specific word or phrase on the Internet, check out Tip
Finding Text
on Web Page.
Help printing web pages, check out
Tip
Print What YOU Want From the Internet.
Printer Friendly Version
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