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are a few tips and tricks to help you get more out of Internet searching.
As you may have
discovered, sometimes a search on certain words will produce too
many results to be useful. For example:
- If you choose
a word that is very common: A search for "Telecom" on
this site will produce a lot of search results. Having to check
each result would take a lot of time.
- If you search
on more than one word without refining the search: A search using
the words "Telecom" and "mobile" won’t
just find references to the Telecom mobile service. What you will
get is every mention of those two words on a web page, no matter
how far apart or unrelated they are.
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You can refine your search to limit the number of results. This will make it easier to
find what you want. Also some sites will offer different ways to get at the
information. Some of the options are: |
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You can use a phrase within quotation marks so that only that phrase and not every mention
of those words will be found, eg "cellular phone" will only find instances of
those two words together on a page. |
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You can use what the boffins call "Boolean operators". Boolean operators
aren’t alien telephonists, but terms that you can insert between words to affect the
search results. Sometimes these words are shown capitalised but they can be entered
using lower case letters as well. Here are some of the most common Boolean operators:
AND:
Find occurrences of both words on a page, eg tolls and rates
OR:
Find occurrences of either word on a page, eg tolls or rates
NOT:
Find occurrences of the first word but not together with the second, eg tolls not
rates |
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As well as allowing you to search for specific topics, some sites also offer you the
chance to view pre-selected categories of information from a "drop down" list. Use
the arrow at the side of the list to scroll down the categories, then select the category
that you are interested in and click the Go button. You will then be presented with
a list of topics in that category. |
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As well as these techniques, each of the Internet search engines has their own form of
advanced search which offers you the chance to limit the search in a variety of ways. This
option is available from the main search page on each site.
For more assistance, you should refer to the help section for each individual search
engine (called variously "Search Help", "Help" or "Search
Tips"). |
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Tip:Rather
than using several search engines one after the other to find what
you want, you can also try one of the "meta" search engines
around like metacrawler.
These sites search several of the key search engines at the same
time, check for any duplication, then return a selection of results
for you to look at.
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