Pick Your Site No one site is good for every search. Yahoo and Lycos are DIRECTORIES, not search engines. They are good for researching general topics. Google and Alta Vista are search engines and are better for yielding very specific information. Metasearch sites like Dogpile and Metacrawler yield specific information by utilizing more than one search engine.

Pick Your Words Most search engines do a poor job when seeking out a single word. Increase the number of words to increase the scope of your search. Choose your search words well -- many search engines ignore common words like 'the,' 'and' and 'Web.'

Use Operators! Most search sites use code words or symbols called operators to make searches more precise. The operators vary from site to site, but the common ones are AND, OR, NOT, quotation marks and the plus and minus sign.

How Operators Work '' ''-- (quotation marks) enclose words to search for an exact phrase: ''Strawberry Fields Forever'' AND connects two or more words, all of which must appear in the results: Strawberry AND Fields AND Forever OR connects two or more search words, any of which may appear in the results: Strawberry Fields OR Strawberryfields More…

NOT excludes the word after it from the results: Strawberry Fields NOT W.C. - (minus sign), like NOT, excludes the word that follows it: Strawberry Fields -W.C. + (plus sign) precedes a word that must appear: +Strawberry +Fields (both words must appear in results) Note that it is possible to string together several operators to construct a very precise query. To exclude certain cover versions of a certain song, for example, you could try: Strawberry Fields AND The Beatles NOT Sandy Farina NOT Nashville Superpickers

Cover All The Bases If you're looking for gardening tips, for example, you may need to account for several different words -- garden, gardens, gardening, gardener and so on. Infoseek and Lycos handle plurals and word stems automatically. Alta Vista uses a different approach, the wildcard character. Enter garden* and you'll get results on all of the different options. Search sites that don't recognize word stems or wildcards need you to think of variants by yourself and search for them all (e.g., garden OR gardening OR gardens).

Use Browser Click Tricks Open a link in a new browser window by holding down the Shift key while clicking on the link. If a page fails to load the first time you click on a link, try clicking again. This allows you to return to your results page without hitting the Back button.

Don’t Stick Around If you don't find what you're looking for in the first couple of results screens, either go back and enter a different set of search terms or move on to another search site. Created by Jo Ellen Mattingly Montevallo Elementary School