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Until you are used to finding things on the web, your biggest problem is going to be “getting lost.” It’s not immediately intuitive how you find information when there is so much out there. More importantly, how do you find exactly what you are looking for in the shortest amount of time? The answer to this question is search. Yahoo! and Google are the two most widely used search engines on the Internet. When you go to either one, you will be presented with a search boxs, where you can enter any query you desire, press Search and get back a listing of results ordered by relevancy.

To maximize your chance of getting relevant results, here are a few search tips:

Shorter is better. If you are looking for Baseball scores in Ohio, Baseball scores Ohio or Ohio Baseball scores are much better queries than, “I want baseball scores from Ohio.” You are entering keywords that are relevant to your search, not phrases.

Use quotes. Use quotes around words that you want to make sure are in your results in the order you enter them. If you enter “Baseball scores Ohio,” you are limiting your search to only those sites that have exactly those words in that order. You may find that doing this improves your result substantial. If you find that you aren’t getting any results, you may want remove the quotes and try again.

Negative terms. Use “-” to exclude certain words from your search results. Lets say you wanted to learn something about alleys, but weren’t interesting in bowling. Searching for alley -bowling would get you those results.

More Tips On Search

“Search for file formats to narrow down and focus your search. For example search for Word documents or PDFs if you are looking for government or industry reports; xls for data and statistics; ppt or pdf for presentations.” — RBA

“What time is it in Bangkok right now? Ask Google. Enter simply what time is it to get the local time in big cities around the world, or add the locale at the end of your query, like what time is it hong kong to get the local time there.” — Lifehacker

“Maybe the most interesting thing I learned through this tutorial had only a tenuous, tangential relation to legal research. Apparently, when doing a Google search, if you include a TILDE before a particular word, Google will include various forms of that word (including synonyms) in its search. So ‘~law’ would return results for ‘law’ and ‘legal,’ as well as other related forms.” — Legalresearchplus

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Basics of Search
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