When you use search engines, it is not unusual to get thousands, even hundreds of thousands of matches for the keywords/phrases you use. It's frustrating and time-consuming to pass through all of them. The Web is potentially a terrific place to get information on almost any topic, but all too often you end up wasting precious time chasing down useless URLs.

First, there is no definitively correct way to search the Web. Some techniques may be faster; others may yield more accurate results.

Despite differences in each search engine's tools, there are some tools that many search engines have in common that can help refine your search to produce a more relevant set of search results. If you tend to use one search engine most often, you are encouraged to learn more about the specific features of that engine.

Search by Using More Words As a general rule, the more words you use, the more accurate your search results will be. By using more words, you will get a smaller set of search results that will be more relevant to you.

Search by Using Quotation Marks

If you enclose two or more words in double quotation marks ("), your search terms will be treated as a phrase. A phrase forces the search engine to find the words you searched for in the same exact order on Websites. For example, a search for cricket clubs is the same as searching for cricket AND clubs. In this case, sites where the words cricket AND clubs both exist on the site but not necessarily in the same order or next each other will be returned as matches. On the other hand, a search of "cricket" will only return Web sites that contained the two words adjacent to each other and in the same order.

When searching for people, double quotation marks will help you refine the search results. For example, a search for Arun Nehru will return sites containing the word 'Arun' and sites containing the word 'Nehru' which is probably not what you wanted. A search for "Arun Nehru" would be more likely hit the mark.

Search by Using Parentheses With parameters, you can combine several search strings in one line to create a highly targeted search. For example, the following search term is used to find web sites that contain images of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh or Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This could be handled with the following query:

("Vincent Van Gogh" OR "Pierre-Auguste Renoir") AND images.

This search is identical to the following search:

("Vincent Van Gogh" AND images) OR ("Pierre-Auguste Renoir" AND images)

Give Meaning to Your Search An example of a text seqence which the search engines hate: To be or not to be. Just about anyone who finished high school will be able to tell you where the phrase comes from and what it means. But some search engines stifle because all the words in the phrase are stop words i.e. too short and too common to be considered relevent strings on which to search. However if you put in the inquiry in quotation marks, "to be or not to be" in that clear-cut order, most search engines can recognize the phrase as a famous quotation from Hamlet.

Let's take a less obvious example. Suppose you are a fan of romatic novels and you want to search for the home pages of authors in that genre. If you simply enter the words romance and author, most search engines will return hyperlinks to all Web documents that contain the word romance or the word, author. This will probably include hundreds or even thousands of URLs, most of which will have no relevance to your search. If you enter the words as a phrase, however, you stand a better chance of getting some good hits.

Field Searching

Field searching allows you to specify where in the text the keywords should appear. It is one of the most effective techniques for narrowing results and getting the most relevant websites listed at the top of the results page.

Boolean Operators

Most major search engines allow some form of advanced searching, but they may use different rules. The most popular form of advanced searching techniques are Boolean operators, such as AND, OR and NOT.

Boolean Logic

Some search engines allow you to use implied Boolean logic where symbols are used instead of the Boolean operators. In this case, the absence of a symbol is significant, and you should be aware that some search engines apply the AND operator implicitly when you enter more than one keyword, but others apply the OR operator. For example, if you enter the words: bykes bicycles- Some search engines treat the space between the keywords as OR and others as AND. You should consult the help file for the search engine to make sure you know which it uses. You can also use the symbols "+" (must include) and "-" (exclude) to narrow your search.

In addition to the title search, other helpful field searching strategies include the domain search, the host search, the link search, and the URL search. The domain search, for example, allows you to limit results to certain domains such as websites from the United Kingdom (.uk), educational institutes (.edu), or government sites (.gov).