Web
search engines like Alta Vista and
Yahoo continually search the Internet
for new documents and add them to their database. The Web
is a very large information resource consisting of millions
and millions of documents, but many of these documents contain
information which you do not want e.g.
material written by
10 years olds (not much detail)
material written by people
who do not know what they are talking about (inaccurate)
advertisements (not
wanted)
personal home pages
(boring!)
academic research papers
(may be too detailed and obscure)
These tips apply to keyword searches conducted
on
AltaVista and
Yahoo. There are other tips that could
also be used but we are concentrating on the essential,
basic search skills here. Different search engines use slightly
different search techniques. For more tips on a greater
variety of search engines, we recommend the
Findspot
search site.
Tip 1 -
Always use + and sometimes a
-
if you want the word to appear in the document, add a +
if you do not want the word in the document, add a
-
e.g. This is the way that you would
write the search keywords in the search box on the search
engine web site: (notice the space after each word)
+Mandela +marriage +Graca -Winnie
Tip
2 - If there is more than one word in the phrase, use "quotation
marks"
This applies if the words for
which you are searching are
a quotation
from a document (e.g. "I have a dream")
a proper name of a person, song or place etc (e.g.
"Trott Moloto" and "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika")
several words, but one idea (e.g. "culture
of learning", or "Bill of Rights")
e.g. (sub-tip:
use capitals if the words are proper names)
