WEB SEARCHING

By

William Holmes

IDENTIFYING KEYWORDS  AND PHRASES

Use Technical terms, Jargon, Proper Nouns

CHOOSING SEARCH ENGINES

Use multiple engines if one doesn’t produce results—Google,  search.MSN.com, Altavista.com, Ask.com, About.com

RESTRICTING CHOICES WITH MORE KEYWORDS, BOOLEAN COMBINATIONS OF KEYWORDS, OR USE OF QUOTES

+  (requires terms to both be present),  - (excludes pages that have the term following),  “” (requires exact text between quotes)

EXPANDING CHOICES WITH FEWER KEYWORDS, BROADER KEYWORDS, USE OF WILDCARDS, OR METAENGINES

*  (wildcard allows varying prefixes and suffixes).  Metaengines:  Search.com,  dogpile.com, webcrawler.com

EVALUATING RESULTS

Use: Credible sites, Technical sites, Documented sites, known sites

TIP

Don’t click on link in search result webpage unless you are sure it’s not a “Phishing” page.