Searching Tips

When searching the Web there are a few things that can make your time more efficient. Firstly, determine what you want to look for. You don't need to enter a long description about what you are looking for, many times this will not give you good results. The biggest tip is to just enter "keyword". For instance if you are looking for the Westerly Chamber of Commerce, you could put - Westerly RI Commerce - or - Westerly Chamber - .

After you search, depending on your results you need to determine if you should widen or narrow your search. If you only got a few results, or none, you should widen your search. You could try searching for - Westerly RI - or - Chamber Commerce - . Because these are more vague you should get more results. If, from the first search, you got a vast number of results, you can narrow your search by trying - Westerly Chamber of Commerce - . Since this is more specific you will get less results, but they will be closer to what you are looking for.

Search engines usually have an "Advanced Search". What does is allow you to specify if you want to search for group(s) of words, and how to handle them. In a regular search, webpages are checked for matches to ANY of the words you put in. In an advanced search you could search for - "Westerly RI" "Chamber Commerce" - . This would search webpages for either "Westerly RI" OR "Chamber Commerce". This would eliminate matches that contain Westerly and RI, but not neccesarily in that order, or together, and the same for Chamber and Commerce.

Other tools allow you to only search for pictures, within the news, the phonebook, etc. If you had heard a story in the news that you wanted to find, it would be more effective to limit your search to just the news than the entire World Wide Web. As well if you were looking for pictures of zebras, it would make sense to only look at pages that have pictures of zebras and not just information.

There are also sites that cater to one catagory, such as airline tickets. These sites are similar to search engines, but are specifically designed for one thing. When searching for something to buy it is a good idea to use more than one site so you can find a product or service that fits your needs best. In terms of airfare, the airlines have begun to have there own "bargain tickets" service to compete with the third party sites of that nature.

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