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Using a Search Engine Effectively

© Chris Cruickshank

Have you ever used one of the major search engines? You enter your search word or phrase only to find that you get 50,000 returns for the word you chose. Trying, isn't it? How are you supposed to find anything in that lot!

Using a search engine need not be such a waste of time providing you know a few simple tricks in order to get what you want. This article explains how to use a search engine so that you can find what you are looking for without being swamped by thousands of returns.

First of all, let's see how a search engine actually works. When a webmaster submits their site to a search engine they will build into their pages special words (known as META tags). Keywords are stored by the search engine along with the address of the page. For example, on my PC Support Page site I use keywords such as "HELP," "PC SUPPORT" and "TECHNICAL SUPPORT" (I have lots of other keywords too but these will illustrate how the search engine works).

If you enter any of my keywords into the search engine the search engine will return the address of my page (a long with a lot of other sites!). Search engines go around the net looking for web sites that use META tags in order to build up a database of information on the World Wide Web. It is therefore necessary to use keywords when you search for information on the Internet.

Let's try an example using the Altavista search engine (http://www.altavista.com/). Visit the search engine site and search for "PC Support" (No quote marks). On the day I did this, Altavista returned 21,169,531 possible entries. My page is in there somewhere!

Rule Number 1: Use as explicit a search as you can.

Let's try again. Enter "PC Support Page" (No quote marks). That returned 17,684,845 possibilities. Still a lot but we are narrowing it down! So what is the search engine actually searching for? It is searching for any site that contains the words "PC," "Support" or "Page." So if there is a site that is concerned with Political Correctness (PC), it will be included in the search. If there is a page about offering support to bereaved mouse mats - it will be included.

We still need a way to trim this down as it is (potentially) including a lot of information that we are not interested in. What we really want to do is search for a listing that has "PC Support Page" and just that - not the single words.

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