Effective Searching on the Internet

Excerpted from

Effective searching requires a combination of innate ability, productive habits, and specific skills. It also helps to have a kind of "sixth sense" about where to look for information and a lot of patience to make it through those long stretches when you can't seem to find anything useful, no matter how hard you try.

That said, anyone can improve their search results by following these 20 rules for effective searching.

Be Curious
Always be on the lookout for information. Think there might be something interesting on a particular Web page? Check it out! You should also let your curiosity lead you through any links on the pages you find. Quite often, good information leads to more good information on a related site. Don't stop when you find a good page—use it as a launching pad for further Web excursions!

Search Secret
Found a Web page that contains good information? Root around other pages on that site to see what else might be there. If the site has its own internal search engine, use it. Click the site's navigation tools to check out other sections of the site. You can even mess around with the site's URL—by dropping parts off the end of the address—to go to other directories within the site.

Make Fast Decisions
Searching can be time consuming. Don't try to read everything you come across. Instead, when you access a page, scan it quickly and decide whether it's useful. Be ruthless in abandoning pages that don't look fruitful. Scan and click, scan and click—the faster you move on, the faster you'll find the right information.

Don't Be Afraid to Try New Things
Dont get stuck in a rut. If you always go to the same search sites and enter the same types of queries, you'll never find anything new or different. Vary your routine on occasion and try some different search engines. Do you always use Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com)? Try Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) or Google (www.google.com) every now and then. You'll never grow unless you try new things from time to time.

Know What You're Looking For
Know exactly what you're looking for before you go online. It helps to visualize what the ideal answer would look like—then figure out how to target a search for that ideal Web page. Think about what you're looking for, about the keywords and phrases you want to use, about which search engines would be best for this particular search. Take the time to thumb through a thesaurus to come up with synonyms for your keywords. Think, plan, and then search.

Use the Right Search Site—or Sites
Remember—no single search site covers 100 percent of the Internet. Even the biggest search engines index only a fraction of the total Web pages currently available—and they all use different methods to create their indexes.

Do you want some targeted pages about a popular topic? If so, you might want to use a directory, such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com). Don't have a clue about where to start? Go to one of the big search engines, such as HotBot (www.hotbot.com) or Northern Light (www.northernlight.com). Looking for industry-specific information? Hit an industry-specific Web site.

Never use a general search site when a specialty site is available. For example, it would be frustrating to use AltaVista (www.altavista.com) to look for information about the computer industry; instead, go directly to CNET (www.cnet.com).

Not Sure? Guess!
Many times you won't even know exactly what it is you're looking for. In these instances, trust your instincts and take a guess on what keywords to include in your query. You might not hit the jackpot right away, but you can learn from the results generated from your educated guess.

Search Secret
It's easy to guess at Web site addresses. If you're looking for a specific company's Web site, try entering www.companyname.com, where the center part of the URL is the name of the company. This trick even works if you're looking for general topics—for instance, try www.cars.com if you're looking for cars or www.genealogy.com if you're looking for genealogical information.

Vary Your Vocabulary—And Your Spelling
When you're searching for a particular word, don't assume that everyone spells it the same way—or knows how to spell it properly, period. It wouldn't be out of the question to find Ernest Hemingway's name misspelled on some sites as Hemmingway or even Hamingway—which means that you might want to extend your search to include common misspellings. Also, don't forget non-American spellings of certain words, such as the British colour for the American color.

Search Secret
Don't forget about synonyms. What you call pink, someone else might call mauve. What's big to you might be large to someone else. Think of all the ways your keyword could be phrased, and include them in a Boolean expression using a lot of ORs—as in high OR tall OR big OR giant.

Truncate—And Use Wildcards
If you're not sure whether you're looking for plurals or singulars (or present tense or future tense), truncate your words and use wildcards. For example, search for dog* to return either a single dog or multiple dogs.

Wildcards are also useful if youre not sure of a word's spelling. For example, if you want to search for both organise and organize, search instead for organi*. This is also a good strategy if you're not sure of someone's full name. Was your old girlfriend named Sherry or Sheryl or Sherylyn? Searching for sher* will find all three.

Make Your Queries Precise—But Not Too Precise
When you're deciding which keywords to use, try to pick words that are precise but not overly restrictive. If you must use a very general word, try modifying it with a more specific word—or you're apt to generate a huge number of results that have little relevance to the specific information you're searching for. For example, car is a pretty general keyword; ford sports car is a much more precise query.

Search Secret
Nouns make the best keywords. Try to answer "who, what, when, where, how, and why" through the use of your keywords. Avoid conjunctions, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives unless they modify a more general noun.

Search for an Exact Phrase
Keywords are great; phrases are better. Instead of searching for three keywords (ford sports car, for example), search for a single phrase ("ford sports car") using quotation marks. All major search sites generate more relevant results when you enter multiple-word phrases rather than a string of grammatically unrelated keywords.

Get the Right Order
When constructing your query, put the important stuff up front. Put keywords or phrases that describe your main subject at the start of your query; put less important words and phrases last. Almost all search engines search for the first words first, and then rank results according to how they match these more important keywords.

Use Your Pluses and Minuses
If your results must match a word, don't assume the search engine will know this; put a + in front of it just to be sure. And think about how excluding certain words or concepts can clean up your results. Use the command to block pages that contain certain words from your results.

Use Boolean Power—But Use It Carefully
Don't be afraid of Boolean searches. Joining words with an AND or excluding words with a NOT can add a lot of power to your searches. The more you use Boolean operators, the more precise your queries can be.

Search Secret
Different search sites use Boolean operators in slightly different ways. The same Boolean query entered at AltaVista (www.altavista.com) might return wildly different results when used at HotBot (www.hotbot.com). If you want to use Boolean operators, make sure you understand exactly how each search site implements them.

Use Advanced Options
Almost every search site offers some sort of advanced search page; find it and use it. These advanced searches typically offer a lot more options that you can use to really fine-tune your search on that site.

Don't Overcomplicate Things
The more complex your query, the more likely you are to make some sort of construction mistake, causing the search engine to get confused. In general, limit your queries to no more than six to eight keywords, and no more than three distinct concepts. The reality is that search engine behavior gets a tad unpredictable with longer, more complex queries—so keep it simple!

Dont Get Too Specific
Another problem with complex queries is that they often create such a specific query that few, if any, results are returned. Yes, looking for dog is too general, but looking for small brown elderly cocker spaniel named Sandy is too specific. If you find yourself getting few results, take some of the parameters out of your query to broaden your search.

Fine-tune Your Results
Your goal is to make the next list of results higher quality than the last—so look closely at the results generated from your initial search. Think about the good matches and the bad matches and why they ended up in the results list, and then enter a new query (based on your initial list of results, perhaps) that uses additional or different keywords, operators, and modifiers.

Search Secret
Some search sites let you add new keywords to an existing query to generate "results from results."

Look for Newer Stuff First
In many cases, the best information is the newest information. On those search engines that let you set a date or age parameter, try looking for information less than a year old. (This advice is especially true if you're looking for technical information.)

Search Secret
If you're looking for recent information, remember that the major search engines and directories sometimes take a while to add new pages to their indexes. Depending on the search site, the process of adding a new page may take from a few hours to a few months. For the most recent information, you might be better off checking the newsgroup archives at Deja.com (www.deja.com) or searching directly at a hard news site.

Be a Pack Rat
Don't dismiss anything you find while engaging in your search activities. You never know when that one little scrap of data will be the key to something more important. It may be a key date here or a link to another page there—whatever you find, no matter how minor, don't throw it away! Print it out, write it down, bookmark it, save the file to disk, whatever—but hold on to anything that may be of value later. (If you decide to print out a page, remember to activate your browser's option to include the page's URL on the printout; that way you'll always have the address if you need to access that Web page in the future.)

Search Secret
You can also use your Web browser's Bookmarks or Favorites feature to keep track of all the pages you've visited and searches you've completed.

Learn from Your Experience
Try to learn something about searching from every search you make. Did using this modifier effectively weed out irrelevant results? Did searching for a phrase rather than separate keywords produce higher-quality hits? If it worked once, it will work again. The more you search, the better the searcher you can be—if you truly learn from what you do.

Search Secret
While you're busy searching through umpteen Web sites, don't forget all the other resources that are available on the Internet. Usenet newsgroups, email mailing lists, chat channels, and even FTP servers often contain truly useful information and files. Don't overlook anything online!