Using a Search Engine

Search engines are among the easiest and fastest ways to find information on the Web. There are many tricks you can use to make your searches more efficient. We're just going to mention a few.

What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is basically a way for a user to access a database of information about many millions of web pages. The user simply types one or more words into the search engine box, and the search engine returns a list of sites or pages that it believes to be most relevant to your request.

Google

The most popular search engine at the time of this writing is Google. Google was one of the very first search engines to use an AND search by default. This, along with a very sophisticated way of searching and indexing pages, produced results that were far more relevant than most other search engines at the time. Users also like Google's clean and simple page design, which avoids clutter, loads quickly, and is easy to use.

Yahoo

Yahoo is the second most popular search engine on the Web. Recently, Yahoo has upgraded its search technology to include caching, image and video search, highlighting of search terms, local search, and many other enhancements to further improve its usefulness and the relevancy of its search results.

"And" versus "Or" Searches and Other Search Tips

We mentioned that Google uses an AND search. What this means is that Google searches for pages that contain all of the words you type in the search box. Most search engines prior to Google used an OR search, in which the pages that were returned merely had to contain any one of the words entered. AND searches tend to return much more relevant results.

For example, if you searched for fire engine using an OR search, you would get a lot of results that contained the word fire or the word engine, but most would not contain both words. Using an AND search, however, only pages that contained both words would come up.

You can force most search engines to do an AND search by including the word AND in between the words, or by putting a + sign before the words. For example, if you wanted to search for documents that contained both the words corruption and politics, you could type either of the following into the search box:

corruption AND politics

+corruption +politics

Terms like "AND" or the plus sign are called operators, and they can help you search more accurately. Another common operator is the - (minus) sign, which basically means the same as "NOT." You can use either operator to tell the search engine to exclude pages that contain a certain word. This can come in handy when you are searching using terms that can be confused with something else.

For example, if you were searching for pages about impalas (the animal), but kept getting results about the car by that name made by Chevrolet, you could type either of the following into the search bar:

impala NOT chevrolet NOT chevy

+impala -chevrolet -chevy

Either of these would instruct the search engine to exclude pages containing the words Chevrolet or Chevy.

One final trick we'll mention is to enclose an exact phrase in quotation marks. This instructs the search engine to return only results that contain that exact phrase. So typing

"fire engine"

in the search box will return pages that all contain the actual phrase "fire engine."