"When all else fails, read the instructions."

Search Tips At A Glance Every search engine has tips and tricks and detailed information about how to best find the information you are looking for in their site. While specific procedures vary from one search engine to the next, here are the basic general concepts that apply across the board. Plain English or Natural Language Search: One of the best methods for beginners, is searching in plain English. All you need to do is compose a simple question. You'll get lots of leads, but the ones most likely to be of interest to you will appear at or near the top. It helps if your question contains an unique keyword or two. Multiple Words and Phrases: The technical term for this type of searching is "boolean searching." The traditional boolean operators include: AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR. AND: Searches for two or more keywords both of which appear in the resulting leads. This is a good strategy for doing precise searches and greatly reducing the number of search results you need to review. OR: This search is much broader than AND and results in a very large number of leads for your to consider. It is a good strategy when there is more than one way that the person, object, or thing you're looking for might be referred to in a Web page. For example, NEA or National Endowment for the Arts or Arts Endowment. NOT: This search allows you to exclude words from your query. It is a good strategy to use when your results contain leads that not appropriate. For example, if you were searching for information on pirates of the Caribbean and the Pittsburgh Pirates were included in your results. You could search for pirates NOT Pittsburgh. Be careful with NOT searches because you can inadvertently exclude relevant material. NEAR: This search allows you to find multiple keywords that are mentioned in the same document, but are not right next to one another. Just how near differs from search engine to search engine. WILDCARDS: Searching with wildcards or truncation means using an asterisk to indicate that you want to search for variations on a particular word. It is good to use a wildcard with at least one other unique keyword. Some search engines such as Excite don't do wildcard searches, but offer concept searching --looking for words in your search requests as well as words and concepts that are similar. STOPWORDS: Stopwords are words that search engines ignore because they're too common or because they are reserved for some special purpose. These may include (the, to, with, from for, of, that, who). If you need a stopword, set it off in double quotes.

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