Searching the internet
Tips for effective searching
The internet is often the first port of call when your child has to do research for a school project. But with billions of web pages at their finger tips, the internet can seem overwhelming.
The web has a lot of information but some of it is misleading, badly written or just wrong and a well-conducted search can save you hours of wasted time.
First, choose your search engine. That's a website that has catalogued lots and lots of other websites and lets you search its records. At the moment the most popular is Google, but Googling - as it is known - is not the only (or necessarily the best) answer to your searching problems. Indeed, there are many alternative search engines to choose from. When you do a search using a search engine, you need to bear in mind the following points if your results are to be worthwhile:
- you need to know what question to ask - any search engine will find it impossible to guess what you want if you simply type one word. Always use a phrase or a sentence and avoid words that have lots of meanings. For example, post can mean a letter, a job, or a part of a fence. The search engine doesn't know which one you mean if you aren't more specific
- learn to try and find as little as possible - if you get four results and those four results are all on the right topic, you're doing very well. So to make your searches as specific as possible, try searching for a phrase related to your topic, you do this by putting the words in quotes rather than just listing them. You might also want to exclude terms and most search engines let you do this by putting a minus sign (-) in front of the word. For example, if you want to find out about primitive weapons, searching for spears will be much more successful if you add -Britney
- use the UK version of the search engine if you want UK-based answers - using the advanced options to return answers in English only can also cut down the number of bad results. Try going to an organisations website and searching just their own pages using the sites own search box
- find out how a search engine chooses what goes at the top of its list - for some search engines, websites pay to get to the top. For others, the rank is decided by how many pages link to it, how many times the searched for word is on the page or even how often the page has been visited. Each method gives you different list of results. Keep trying. Try as many search engines as you can and bookmark your favourites. If searching using one phrase provides too much or too little information, take a minute to rethink how to ask the question in a different way and try again. It might save you hours of frustration
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