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Web Search Tips

  

Phrases Within Quotation Marks

Putting a phrase within quotation marks means that only those sites that contain that exact phrase will be retrieved by the search engine. example: "green bay packers"

Capital Letters

Most search engines retrieve both lower case and capitalized words if you type your request in lower case letters. Capitalizing proper names usually reduces the number of items retrieved. general dynamics will get different results than will General Dynamics in some but not all search engines.

Boolean Operators

Most search engines incorporate Boolean search capabilities in some form or other. There is usually a default "simple" search mode and an "advanced" or "power" search mode that allows you to combine terms in specific ways to increase the likelihood of finding what you are looking for. The following three terms used between search terms produce very different results:

AND narrows a search: monarch AND butterfly
(retrieves only those sites that have both words)

OR broadens a search: cats OR kittens
(retrieves sites that have either word)

AND NOTexcludes a term completely from a search: pets AND NOT dogs
(retrieves sites about other kinds of pets, but not those that include the term dog)

+A plus sign adjacent to a word means the word must be included in the results: +monarch +butterfly

-A minus sign adjacent to a word means the word must be excluded from the results: +pets -dogs

Truncation

* or ! An asterisk or exclamation point at the end of a string of letters (check the help page of the specific search engine for which it uses) means the search will find all words beginning with that string of letters. institut* retrieves institute, institution, institutional. Be careful about truncating a word that could have lots of endings in foreign languages. It's a good idea to use the limit language feature of the search engine if you use truncation.

Languages

Most search engines allow you to specify the language to which you wish to limit your search. Some also provide English translation for foreign language web pages.

Dates

Most search engines allow you to limit your search to a range of dates which can help to reduce the number of "hits."

Titles

All web pages have a title as part of the heading coding. Some search engines allow you to limit your searches to words or phrases in the title. This will reduce the number of hits and increase the likelyhood of finding something on your topic. However, it will miss a number of relevant pages that are on the topic but don't have the search word in the title.

URL's

Some search engines allow you to search for characters in the URL address of the web page. Some allow you to limit your search by the end of the URL (e.g. edu, gov, org, or com) Edu sites tend to be university, college or K-12 school sites; gov will bring up useful federal, state and local government sites; org includes a lot of non-profit groups and com is reserved for businesses.

Maintained by Karen Fischer. Last updated 8/16/01