Google Yahoo Ask Bing Excite MSN

Live Search HotBot ChaCha Dogpile Google Yahoo Ask Bing

Excite Google Yahoo Ask Bing Excite MSN Live Search HotBot ChaCha Dogpile Google Yahoo

Search Engines

Tips and Tricks for Effective Searching

About this Tutorial

Faculty:This tutorial was made using Microsoft PowerPoint 2007.

This tutorial will help students• Search effectively• Find more relevant results• Find more credible results

Students:This tutorial will:• Teach you specific strategies for using search engines• Teach you how to cut out unnecessary searchingIt should take you about 20 minutes to complete.

This tutorial meets the following ACRL standards:

1.1d1.4a2.2d

What to watch for…

Notes – These are to let you know there is important information you need to know about what is being covered.

A search engine is an online tool that checks web pages for the search terms you enter into it. When it comes to search engines, there are many choices.

There are a few different tips and tricks that will help get the desired results in all of them. This includes knowing the benefits of using certain search options and commands.

A search engine might ignore the words “I” and “the”.

Most search engines will assume and modify things about a regular sentence. For example in the sentence:

I want to know the date of the Lunar Landing

Though this is not a full sentence, the search engine will recognize the important words, and give you better results. Better results means better research.

Date of Lunar Landing

In this case you would want to modify your search, for example instead of the above sentence you may use this phrase for your search:

It is possible that the search engine may also do some stemming. This means that it would search for variations of the words in your original search.

There are advantages and disadvantages to search engine stemming:• On the one hand, you may be interested in some of the topics the engine includes

with your search, and they may be of some use in whatever research you are doing. • On the other hand, it may be harder to find what you are searching for when extra

results have been added due to stemming.

Ways to Conserve Energy

Wildlife Conservation Energy Crisis in California

In this example, the search engine would have read Conserve and Energy separately, giving unrelated results.

If you want to avoid stemming, and unwanted results, there are a couple of tricks to use.

Quotations:When you use quotations in a search, you will be telling the search engine to look for those specific words, and nothing else. This will often lower the amount of results.

Without quotations:

With quotations, a significantly smaller number of results:

In Title Commands

This command will tell the search engine to only give results that have the words of the search terms in the title of the result. You give this command by typing in title: before your search terms.

For example:In title: “high school curriculum”

:

To further narrow your results, most search engines have an Advanced Search option.

These are the advanced search options on:

When searching on Google, there is an option to define your search. This is helpful when you are searching for something you don’t understand, or have never heard of before.

On most search engines you can also use the Define Command. This tells the search engine that you want a definition, and the engine will usually bring it up as the first result.

To use the Define Command, simply type define: and your search term, like in this example from:

We’ve covered just a few of the tricks that can make a search results more effective. Many search engines also offer things like images, videos, maps, and more. It can be helpful to use a variety of search engines, and search on them often to understand the benefits each one has to offer.

Now you can turn your searching into finding!