Advanced Internet Searching – how to search the internet quicker and more effectively

Here are some tips which will save you time and give you better results.

• To conduct a search you type key words into the Search Box.

Let’s say you want to buy books in Adelaide.

• Use more precise words—Instead of just typing ‘books’, try ‘bookshops Adelaide’.
• Use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase

If you are looking for an exact phrase you may not get good results by typing only the phrase into your search engine. A good tool for exact phrases is quotation marks. If you want to search for an exact phrase such as Pulitzer Prize winner you can enclose it in quotation marks and the search engine will only bring up pages that have that exact phrase in the exact order in which you typed it. That way you will not get hundreds of listing on Pulitzer Prizes or the nominees, you will only get Pulitzer Prize winners.

• Don’t use too many words—avoid typing in full questions, as every word will be searched for. Just use the key words.

Minus searches

If you are looking for a smaller or less known item such as a small bookshop it can be helpful to weed out the larger businesses. This can be done using a minus – sign in your search. Put a minus sign in front of terms you don’t want to search for. If you want to leave out shops owned by the Lola Bookshop Company, you could put ‘-Lola’ in your search terms so it reads “bookshops –Lola”.

Images

If you’re only looking for pictures, click on the ‘Images’ link at the top or left of the search engine page and type your topic into the search field.

Remember that images you find on the Internet are usually copyright, meaning you can't use them in your own work unless you seek permission from the copyright holder.There are a number of websites where you can buy access to stock photography images such as www.bigstockphoto.com. You are able to use the stock photos in your own work.

Assessing a search—be careful what you read

• With so much information available, it’s important to think about search results and the quality of the information in them.
• Let’s say you want to find out about treatments for back pain and you search for ‘medicine back pain’. The results may contain articles by doctors, advertisements from pharmacology companies, personal opinions by sufferers and wild claims about untested miracle cures. How can you tell which information is useful to you?

An excellent approach is to think about:

• Currency—is the information up to date?
• Reliability—is the information mostly opinion? Is it balanced? Are there references and sources for any claims made?
• Authority—who wrote the information? What are their credentials? Are they reputable? Are there advertisements on the website?
• Purpose/point of view—is the information intended as opinion, fact or advertising?

There are tools available to assist with more detailed and specific searches and some of these are identified below:

What is a Boolean Search?

• Boolean searches allow you to combine words and phrases using the words AND, OR, NOT and NEAR (known as Operators) to limit, widen, or define your search. Most Internet search engines default to a Boolean AND search, but its handy for you to know how to do a basic Boolean search.
• Boolean logic is just the term used to describe certain logical operations that are used to combine search terms in many search engine databases and directories on the Net.

Basic Boolean Search Operator - AND

Using AND narrows a search by combining terms; it will retrieve documents that use both the search terms that you specify, as in this example:

Adelaide AND South Australia

Basic Boolean Search Operator - OR

Using OR broadens a search to include results that contain either of the words you type in. OR is a good tool to use when there are several common spellings or synonyms of a word, as in this example:

computer OR pc

Basic Boolean Search Operator - NOT

• Using NOT will narrow a search by excluding certain search terms. NOT retrieves documents that contain one, but not the other, of the search terms you enter, as in this example:
   
  Adelaide NOT travel.
 

Keep in mind that not all search engines and directories support Boolean terms. However, most do, and you can easily find out if the one you want to use supports this technique by consulting the FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) on a search engine or directory's home page.

Further Search Operators include:

• NEAR means you want all the words in that specific order or the actual phrase.
• NAND means a combination of NOT and AND
• NOR means a combination of NOT and OR

If you know the website you are looking for is specific type of website, for example a website for a government agency or a school can be identified by the last part of its web address.
For example
http://www.tafe.sa.edu.au/
http://www.sa.gov.au/

• .com = a commercial business
• .edu = an educational institution
• .gov = a governmental institution
• .org = a non-profit organization
• .biz = a business

Example: to search for a South Australian Government website you would type “South Australia site:.sa.gov.au” into your search engine.
You can also select to search for websites from a specific country.

• .au = Australia
• .fr = France
• .co.uk = England

Example: for Holiday websites from Australia you would type “holidays site:.au” into your search engine.