Before You Begin

You can spend hours browsing or surfing the Internet with nothing to show for it. Before you search, get organized. Because of the enormous amount of information on the Internet, conducting a search randomly will only frustrate you and waste your time.

Last week you used key words to conduct basic searches. This week, work on developing a search strategy. Review your key words and identify alternate spellings, plurals, and synonyms. Think about your topic and what types of sites contain useful information. For example, if you are looking for information on gourmet cooking, you might find much better information at a site hosted by Julia Child than at a site on comparing fast-food restaurants.

Simple Searches

Simple searches use key words. You enter a key word or string of words into a search engine or directory and get back a list of sites. A simple search uses a single word such as "cat." A simple search can be a great way to get started because it is quick and usually returns many results. Because search tools catalog information differently, conduct a simple search with several search tools and compare the results. Simple searches can produce thousands of hits; the difficult part is isolating those that are useful.

For more hints on effective searching, try this Classroom Connect site.

Boolean Operators

You can broaden or narrow your searches with a combination of key words and Boolean Operators. Boolean Operators are words that define the parameters of a search, including AND, OR and NOT.

AND will produce results for both keywords. For example, if you searched for "cats AND dogs," the search engine would return Web pages that contain both words.

OR will produce results for both keywords but will broaden the search because the search engine will look for pages that contain one OR the other key word (both don't have to be on a particular page for the search tool to list it in the results).

NOT will exclude one of the keywords from the search. For example, if the search were phrased "cats NOT domestic," the results would be pages about cats, but not domestic cats.

You can use more than one Boolean term in a search, but it can be tricky to put them together.

Implied Boolean

Using key words and mathematical symbols to express a search topic is called implied Boolean searching. For example, a search for dogs and cats could be phrased "dogs + cats." The plus sign indicates that you are searching only for sites that contain the word "dogs" and the word "cats."

A plus sign (+) means include a certain term in a search. For example, to search for dinosaurs of the Jurassic period, you would type "+ dinosaur + Jurassic."

A minus sign (-) means exclude a term. For example, to search for dinosaurs of the Jurassic period but not in the movie "Jurassic Park," you would type "+ dinosaur + Jurassic - Park."

A wildcard (*) stands for any letter. Use this symbol to look for singular and plural forms of a word and for words that contain the same string of letters. For example, you'll get different results if you search for dinosaur instead of dinosaurs. Searching for dinosaur* will produce all variations of the word.

Quotation marks (" ") keep words together as a specific phrase. For example, you could type "Jurassic period," and the search engines would look for that specific phrase.

Case matters! Capital and lowercase letters make a huge difference in many search engines. Use lowercase letters unless the case matters to your search.

Type the word "link:" and the URL of a page to find all Web pages that are linked to a particular Web site. This can give you leads for other sites related to your topic.

Type "title:" and a key word to search for the key word only in the title of Web pages.

Understanding Search Results

Knowing how to search is only half the battle. Each search produces a list, sometimes quite lengthy, of sites that could be related to your topic. Although each search tool has its own nuances, most results contain

the title (usually a hyperlink) and URL of each Web site.

a description (some useful, some not!) of each Web site.

Some search tools also include the date that the site was last modified, the size of the file, the language in which it was written, and related or similar sites. Get to know the specific features of search tools that you like, and you'll get the most out of them.

Web site addresses (URLs) tell you where a site is hosted and what type of site it is. URLs contain a domain name that organizes sites into six broad categories:

.com commercial businesses

.net network organizations

.edu educational institutions

.org nonprofit organizations

.gov government agencies

.mil military

Advanced Searching Options

Most of the major search engines have advanced options that help users clearly define their searches. Many of these use Boolean logic and include options for different languages, date parameters, and sorting. If available, read the FAQ and Help areas of each search tool before you use it.