Internet search is so popular that it has created a new verb- to Google- meaning to do an Internet search.
For many search engines are the gateway to the Internet. In fact the Internet would probably be almost usable without them. The three most popular search engines today are:

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

Between them these search engines account for probably over 90 percent of all web searches. Using search engines is not that difficult but there are many different ways of searching that most people never get to use.

Basic Internet Search Techniques

To perform a search you need to decide on the search terms (keywords) you are going to use. For example if you were interested in going on a camping holiday you would enter the words:-
camping holidays in the search field of your favourite search engine.

Notice that I haven’t used the + sign as by default the major search engines will do it automatically so:

Camping holidays and camping+holidays are identical and tell the search engine
to show any pages that contain both words anywhere on the page. If you wanted to exclude certain countries you could use the minus (-) sign as follows:

Camping holidays- France -uk

Which would show camping holidays except those that contained either UK or France.

Plural and Singular And Case

Holiday is not the same as holidays and a search on camping holidays would give different results as for
camping holiday.

However search engines are not case sensitive and so camping holiday and CAMPING HOLIDAY are the same.

Getting more Specific with Quotes

If the words normally appear together then you can use quotes to enclose the words e.g. “mother Goose” or
“star trek” or “Dr Who” . You can even combine them so

“mother Goose” +book

shows all of the pages that contain the term “mother goose” and the word book. Whereas

“mother Goose” -book

shows all of the pages that contain the term “mother goose” and not the word book.

Setting Search Preferences

All the major engines let you customise the search results in some manner. You can:

• Filter out adult content (safe search)
• Increase/decrease Results on the Page
• Limit results to a particular language
• Open links in new browser so that you can easily go page to the search results page.

This you can change these setting in :

Google - In Preferences

MSN - In Settings

Yahoo - In Advanced search

Search Engine Toolbars

Google, Yahoo and MSN provide toolbars that make it easier to search. These toolbars add in to the regular toolbar on Internet explorer and means that you can search Google etc without having to go to the website.

Here is a picture of my Internet explorer with both the Yahoo and Google Toolbar added.

Not only do they allow faster searching they also provide additional features like popup blockers, spyware detection etc. If you don’t want them displayed you can disable/enable them by clicking View>toolbars and selecting/deselecting the toolbar:

The toolbars are available at:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar
• MSN Toolbar

Specialised searches Video, Music, Pictures, Blogs, Local etc

Again you will find these options on the major search engines. These allow you to search just for pictures or music etc.

Yahoo, Google and MSN displays them above the search bar. Here is the Yahoo display:

If you click the images tab and enter your search query the search results will all be images.

Meta Search Engines

According to various Internet search surveys over 50% of searchers use multiple search engines to search. Which means they try Google and if they are unhappy with the results they move to Yahoo or MSN.

For those searchers Meta search engines are the ideal choice as they combine results from various search engines.

• Dogpile
• Metacrawler
• Excite

Other search engines that allow you to search multiple engines from a single page

• Whonu

Meta search engines tend not to support the advanced search features found with the standard search engines.

Desktop Search Engines

Are you always loosing stuff on your PC. Do you read something and then a few months later wonder what document or email it was in, so you can find it again?

If you do then you may want to bring the power of the search engines to your desktop. Google and
Yahoo and MSN all let you download your very own desktop search engine, that will index the contents of your computer and let you search for it.

Note: only use one of them

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