How To Search The Internet Effectively

Whether you’re a professional, a student or simply have a question you need answered, everyone ends up using a search engine at one time or another. Effective searching isn’t always as easy as plugging a word or phrase into a search box and choosing the first item listed, it sometimes takes patience and proper techniques to find exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re having trouble finding the right piece of information for your homework, the right recipe for your dinner party, or a little nugget of information to settle a debate, then analyzing your search methods might be the key to success.
About Searching
The internet is a vast repository of information, so large that nobody knows exactly how many web pages there are in existence. There is so much information to sift through in fact, that no one search engine could possibly search all of it. If you were to think of the internet as an ocean, search engines would be the net that drags the water looking for exactly what you want, and your search results would amount to no more than a drop of water in comparison to the vast amount of knowledge that is available.
So, how do you find the right drop? Effective searching can help.
Choose Your Engine
If the internet is like an ocean, then each search engine is a different net. Some are bigger than others, and most search the same general areas, but every engine's 'search pattern' is slightly different. This will in turn yield different results. Search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo are usually sufficient for most searches, but for different results you might want to try a meta data search engine such as Clusty, Excite or MetaCrawler. For more serious research you could also try obtaining permissions to search journal databases, such as those available at most public and school libraries.
Look at Your Topic
Choosing the right words to describe what you want to find is very important. There is a big difference between searching for �cats’ and searching for �felines’. These two searches will yield quite different results, and so if you aren’t finding what you want with the words you are using, try finding another way of describing your topic.
Narrow Your Search
You’ve searched for Wild Cats on Google and came back with over 15 million results. What do you do with that? This is where the Advanced Search can come in handy, and also pare down your results into something a little more manageable.
Too many results from a search often means you have more �misses’ than hits. You don’t need 15 million pages to write your essay about cats, but you do need a few really good sources that are useful. It’s time to go back to your topic � what more do you need to know about your cats? Are you looking for their behavior? Are you looking for a specific type of wild cat?
Being more specific in your searching will not only reduce the amount of sifting you have to do later, but will often bring you better results on the first page. So if you were to instead search for �Wild Cats of the Amazon’, instead of fifteen million, you are now down to six hundred thousand results, and you’ve eliminated millions of others that are not related to your specific topic.
Weed the Results
Another way to narrow your search is to use the �NOT’ option in the advanced search. If you are searching for �Wild Cats’ and keep finding pages about sports teams or cartoon characters, you can use the �not’ limiter to disqualify any pages that mention these words. Be careful to not limit your search too much though, or you may be faced with the dreaded �no pages match your query’ page! A search that is too narrow is just as bad as a search that is too broad.
Searching doesn’t have to be a chore. The next time you need to find something, don’t settle for the first hit that comes up in Google - take the time to narrow your search and find exactly what you want. You may be surprised at what you can find, with the right tools.