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Search strategies

Identifying key words

One of the most important steps in searching the Internet is to identify the key words. First you must come up with a question. It helps if you write down what you are looking for in question form.
Next you must ask yourself : what is my question really about? For example: What are the most important characteristics of the mammals of a Australia? The question is really asking you to find out about the key words: Australian mammals. So you would type Australian mammals into a search engine to get the most relevant hits. The use of a phrase is preferable to using single words.

Narrowing your search

What you type in the search engine box can be thought of as the answer to the "fill in the blank" question, eg find me information on.….It must be very specific. For example, typing: ‘cats’ should find you many hits of information about these animals. However the aim is to narrow your search so you might be more specific eg. ‘Siamese cats’.
The search can also be narrowed by having a range of key words. We can generate good lists of key words (synonyms) by consulting a thesaurus. This often accompanies most good word processing programs. Thesauri can also be found on the Internet eg Visual Thesaurus http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus/

The following is an example of using a thesaurus for the word "conservation": "Conservation," the thesaurus tells us, might be replaced by related words such as: "preservation, protection, saving, conservationism, conservancy, ecology, management, perpetuation, preserve, sanctuary, refuge, protected species."

Successful searching is a trial-and-error process of trying out various word combinations until the searcher discovers the words that fit. Sometimes word searches turn up nothing worth reading. If early efforts turn up just a handful of articles, it often pays to skim those articles looking for unusual words that you might never have thought of using.

Using syntax

Search engines vary in the way they use commands (syntax) to search the Internet. It is useful to use the Help facility that comes with all search engines.
Use capital letters for the names of people and places, and use a comma to separate lists of names.
To find a group of words that must appear together, eg. Australian animals, use double quotation marks (" Australian animals "),or hyphenate (Australian-animals).

Boolean commands

Some search engines such as Altavista AdvancedSearch use Boolean commands (operators). The following words can direct and narrow a search toward useful sources:

AND - When placed between two words (solar AND system ) the program searches for documents which contain BOTH words anywhere in the document.
OR - This operator sometimes has the tendency to throw too big a net and is generally discouraged, but there are some useful times to use it. When placed between two words (dogs OR cats) the program searches for documents which contain either of those words. This will usually return too large a sample unless the OR search is combined with an AND search, with the first word being fairly broad and the OR being used with a series of related words which are within parentheses - cf. "dogs and (feral OR wild )"
NOT - This operator helps to eliminate unwanted articles. When placed between two words (energy NOT solar) the program searches for articles which contain the first but not the second word.

Other Search engines use (+) and (-). For example, Altavista simple search allows you to put a plus sign (+) in front of words that must be in pages found by the search. For example, to find the city of Sydney use Sydney+city. Do not put a space between the plus sign (+) and the word.

Refining the search

Altavista Advanced Search has a number of useful features. For example, it allows you to specify one keyword to be given the highest ranking and priority in compiling the results list. Altavista also makes it possible to set a range of dates, thereby excluding old material or focusing upon a particular period.
Refine Search saves you the trouble of browsing hundreds of results looking for trends and categories. It looks through your thousands of hits and sorts them into categories, providing you with a list. When you review the list of hits from your search, leave out irrelevant sites and target more directly those pages and sites most likely to deliver the best result

Results

When you are examining the results of your search look at the first 50 listings and if nothing turns up try another search engine. If the page selection you get is too broad , you need to add more key words separated by AND. Some search engines, such as Excite have a "find more pages like this one" facility.

More detailed hints for searching on the Internet can be found at: http://www.searchenginewatch.com