To become a web Jedi master, you need to become facile with at least one search engine... so facile that doing a search becomes completely automatic. This state will come fairly quickly as long as you practice frequently.
The first step is to bookmark and become familiar with the interface and help pages associated with each search engine you use. The most comprehensive engine out there at the moment seems to be AltaVista.
You can access the AltaVista simple search here, and you can there is a simple search help page that you should look over now, before we start.
Simple Search Practice
| The first
basic tool to practice with the simple search is the use of + and - to
include or exclude words. For example, if you wanted to find sites about
backgammon, you'd type +backgammon into the query box. Try it now, and
record how many sites you find.
Notice also that the ad at the bottom of the screen changes in response to your query. That's who's paying for this terrific service! Try another. Suppose you wanted to find sites about the lost continent of Atlantis, not the shuttle Atlantis. Try these: Note: There's no space between the + and the word, but there is a space between words. E.g.: +Atlantis <space> -shuttle <space> +continent |
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| A common
mistake people make is to inadvertantly narrow their search too much by
excluding variations on a word they're looking for. For example, if you
typed in +mushrooms, you'd miss all those pages that just had the singular
word mushroom on them.
The * wildcard stands for any letter(s). The wildcard is also useful for catching other variations on word such as different forms of a verb. In general, never search for the plural of a word. Use the wildcard and get both forms. |
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| AltaVista
pays attention to any capital letters you type into a query. If you search
for Octopus, it will only find documents in which it's spelled that way.
In general, unless you're after a particular spelling, use all lower case.
Try these: |
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| If you
type a sequence of words in as a query, AltaVista will look for documents
that contain any of those words. If you want the words to hang together
as a phrase, you should put double quotes around them.
Try these: |
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