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Searching Tips

Use more search terms. The "AND" operator is unnecessary -- most search engines include all search terms by default.

Use quotes to limit your search to sites which contain all of the words together in a phrase.

Most search engines recognize quotation marks in the same way. Your search will be greatly focused by the addition of quotes.

search: community college Results may--according to the default search method of a search engine-- include every site with the word community and every site with the word college.
search: "community college" Results will be limited to sites where these two words appear next to each other in this order.

Use capital letters for proper names. Some search engines are "case sensitive", meaning they will search for an exact match of upper or lower case letters. This can greatly increase the relevancy of your search results.

Check your spelling.

Try different words that mean the same thing. Some search engines allow complex searches using combinations of many terms. Look for "Advanced Search" or "Power Search" options at the search engine of your choice. There may be ways to include multiple terms for the same thing.

For example: (community or junior or technical or "two year") AND (college or school)

Try different search engines and directories, such as Yahoo, AllTheWeb, or Google, for the same search. Each search engine has software which constantly roams the Web to gather sites for its unique index. Each search engine gathers sites at its own rate, indexes them, and produces results in its own way. Search engine indexes are updated at different schedules. Old and defunct URL's (Uniform Resource Locator's are Web addresses) may remain in a search engine index for months. New sites show up in search engine databases at different times. Your search term may be relevant in one search engine database and not so relevant in another.

Subject directories to the Web, such as Yahoo! or Librarians' Index to the Internet, have been assembled with human intervention. Subject directories are much smaller databases of Web sites and each entry has been examined and sometimes evaluated by a human being and assigned to a subject category.

There are thousands of specialized databases available containing information not indexed by search engines or subject directories. For example, The San Francisco Chronicle provides a searchable database of the full-text of staff written articles since 1995. This information is accessible only through the search engine at the Chronicle Website. There are also commercial databases on the Web, such as EBSCOHost, which provide authority and editorial control and are accessible only by paid subscribers.

Guessing can be faster than searching. Many company URL's are obvious: Sony's address is http://www.sony.com ; Wal-Mart's is http://www.wal-mart.com, for example. Just click once at the end of the current address in the location window of your browser. Now type in a new address (you don't need to type http://) and press the Enter key on the keyboard. If you guess correctly you can bypass the search engines altogether!