The Internet is the most important communications advance since television, putting much of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips.
There’s just one problem: finding just the needle of information you want in the haystack of all that data!
What you’re looking for online is usually found through a service called a search engine. Chances are, you already use one regularly. The top three are Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo. If you use Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari as your browser, you know that each has a field at the top right of the browser for doing searches. In Google’s Chrome browser, the same field at the top that shows the current Web address is also used as the search field.
Of course, you can also go to a search engine’s main page — google.com, bing.com or yahoo.com — and work from there.
The key to finding what you want online is to phrase your search terms well. There are times when being very specific works best; other times, you’ll want to be deliberately vague. What’s important is to use the wording that’s most apt to find the page you’re looking for.
Suppose you want to find information about the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Typing in Jefferson Memorial will obviously get you the best results. But suppose you didn’t know the name of that particular monument. Searching on Jefferson statue will return a lot of hits from different places. Adding Washington, D.C., will focus those results.
It also helps to know that search engines generally ignore common words such as and, a, in, the and so on. You can usually phrase your search without them.
Using Quote Marks
If you’re looking for something very specific — say, a phrase or a headline — then put it inside quote marks when you search. When you don’t use quotes, Google…