I rarely seem to be able to find what I am looking for when using the

I rarely seem to be able to find what I am looking for when using the search engines. Is it me or am I doing something wrong?
- Rachael

This question was answered on July 30, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

The primary goal that all search engines strive for is relevance They have been trying for years to develop very sophisticated methods of determining the content and ultimately the relevance of a web site based on key words or phrases.

Whenever I observe inexperienced users attempting to use search engines, most make one of two mistakes They either put a single word in as a search condition, which returns millions of generalized results; or they submit a complete question as if they were talking to a human instead of a big ball of computer code

Your best results generally exist by using something in between At <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google.com </a> for instance, ‘insurance’ is not as relevant a search phrase (15,500,000 pages) as ‘auto insurance’ (1,090,000 pages) which is not as good as ‘auto insurance Arizona’ (152,000 pages) If you really want to limit the number of pages and increase your chances of getting only relevant sites, put the search phrase in quotation marks Ex: “auto insurance Arizona” (14 pages!).

Generally speaking words like “in, the, & and” are ignored by the search engines in order to concentrate on the key words so don’t include them unless you are doing a search for an exact phrase that contains these words.

If you really have to use complete sentences, give Ask Jeeves a try a <a href="http://www.ask.com" target="_blank">www.ask.com</a>.

Most search engines will also allow you to search within the results, so if you get too many pages by putting a generic word in, try this option instead of starting over again.

The “advanced search” section of your favorite search engine will give you a whole new set of options for generating relevant results.

My favorite search engine, “Google.com” takes the technical jargon like “boolean” out of the advanced search feature with an easy form based interface You can search by language, dates or even invoke a “filth” filter

One of the most powerful uses for Google is to use it as a site search engine on a large site Microsoft.com, for instance, has an enormous amount of information, put unless you are technical, you may easily get frustrated trying to find things using their site search Google allows you to search for a key word or phrase on a specific site, so the next time you get an error message from Windows, try putting the key words of the error message in Google followed by ‘site: www.microsoft.com’.

Sometimes less is more and that’s when a ‘directory’ may be a better than a search engine <a href="http://www.yahoo.com" target="_blank">Yahoo!</a> is the largest directory or index of sites on the Net that is actually assembled by humans instead of automated computer scripts This means that there are fewer sites in the directory than a standard search engine but the relevance tends to be very high as a result If you ask Yahoo! to search for a phrase, it will show you its directory results first but you can click on the ‘Web Pages’ entry at the top if you want to see the results for the phrase from Google, which is an actual search engine.

Another very popular search method is to use a ‘metasearch engine’ such as <a href="http://www.dogpile.com" target="_blank">DogPile.com</a> A metasearch will submit your phrase to all the major search engines and bring back the top results from each all at the same time.

If you really want to learn the nitty-gritty about search engines, give <a href="http://www.searchenginewatch.com" target="_blank">www.searchenginewatch.com</a> a try!