Category: Search Tips

• Enter or the word or words you wish to search on and press the search button.  You will see a list of links which contain your search term.  By clicking on a link within that list you will be taken to the web site containing the source document.
• Searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case
• Use "quotation marks" to surround phrases, making sure that the words you search for are found together
• Use a hyphen immediately before a word or phrase to exclude it, eg. -word
• Use OR between words or phrases if you are looking for items which have either. The OR applies only to the word/phrase on either side, eg. black cat OR kitten will find items that include cat and also contain either cat or kitten.
• An asterisk (*) can be used inside a phrase as a wildcard word, eg. "I like * in the morning" will match I like coffee in the morning and I like tea in the morning, among others.
• Include synonyms of a word by preceding it with a tilde (~) eg. ~best "board game" also uses words like top and greatest in addition to best.
• Use two periods between numbers to find any number in that range, eg. beagle 1800..1900 will find pages that refer to the voyage of the HMS Beagle that Charles Darwin was on, as the boat sailed within that time range.
• Uses AND operator by default, if more than one query word is used, it finds pages that include all the query words.
• Common words and characters such as “where” and “how”, as well as certain single digits and single letters, have been removed because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results.

Although most people believe they have a good idea of how to find things on the Internet many don’t know about some simple techniques to enhance the power of their searches. I am by no means an expert on the subject; even some of the tips in this article were new to me. I wish to start with the choice of search engines. There are many more search engines out there than you’re probably aware of, all you really need to know about are the top three. From what I have found Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the top three. If you already have a favorite, you should continue using what you are most comfortable. If you don’t have a favorite, I might suggest becoming familiar with Google. I don’t keep up much with technology news but what I have seen from Google in the last two years leads me to believe they will eventually be the very best at Internet searches by a wide margin.

I will take for granted that most of you know how to do a basic search, and even a phrase search (enclose a phrase in “your search phrase”). Most are not aware however that you can limit your searches to documents of a specific type (i.e. Word, PowerPoint, and HTML). In addition to this, you can limit your searches to certain sites, documents within a specific date range, documents that contain one word but exclude other words, or limit the search to the title of a document or the contents of the document. All of these features can be found in Google’s advanced search page one of the nicest things that I have seen this year from Google is the ability to create your own custom search engine. This is simpler than you might think and well worth your time if you find yourself searching the same sites over and over again. This feature does require that you create a free Google account which you can do at: www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount for those of you who also design web sites, you can add Google’s Powerful Analytics (web site statistics) to your web pages. I have not seen anything which is free of charge that can compare with the amount and level of detail that Google Analytics offers.