Internet research, 10 Tips to Improve your Results

The Internet is a huge storehouse of knowledge, but unless you can find your way to that information it is useless. Here are some tips to make searching for information easier and more rewarding.

Start your research with a pen and paper, and collect together your ideas about what you want to find. Choosing the right search Strings is the key to finding the information you want. e.g. If you where to search for me on the web you could try "Graham Taylor", "Graham A Taylor", "Graham Andrew Taylor", profile "Graham Andrew Taylor",

With names you will get better results by enclosing the names in exclamation marks (") this will make the search engine look at the group of words as a whole rather that individually.

Start Searching with a general term, and then narrow your focus, for example if your search is for a car, just entering "car" will return about 990,000,000 results, "Ford car" improves that to 8,430,000 while "ford mustang 2008" reduces that down to about 901,000. Ford Mustang 2008 Arizona, further reduces the number of results to around 312,000 so you can see the more refined your search term the more specific your results will be. Vary the order of the word you search with, as you saw above ford mustang 2008 Arizona gave us 312,000 but "2008 mustang Ford Arizona" gave 128,000 and "Arizona mustang Ford 2008" returned 948,000

Another way of using specific words is to use a plus + or minus sign in your search string. Using the same details as above you could enter Graham+Andrew+Taylor and get almos identical results. If you used the Subtract sign Graham+Andrew+Taylor-2008 the results would show most of the first set of results, except that did not contain the word 2008 for example any article that had a 2008 copyright.

Use "AND " and "OR" and "NOT"to refine your search, as in "Graham Taylor"OR "Graham Andrew Taylor"NOT "Graham George Taylor"

Unless what you are searching for is a proper name use lower case letters to enter your search string, this will get the search engine to search both upper and lower case versions of the word.

Use more than one search engine, while Google is the largest, it still does not index the entire web, so you might get different results from different search engines, like Ask and MSN,

You can copy and paste your search string from one engine to an other (control C to copy Control V to paste)

Use the tools that the search engines provide, Google has an Advance search tool at http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Remember to phrase the question in different ways, as this will often change the results, a search for "search engines are" will give results that are less commercial than just "search engines"

I hope that these tips will make your searching more enjoyable and more importantly give you the results that you need.