Searching the Internet can be a frustrating experience,
there's so much info out there to plough through. You might spend days
reading all sorts of wonderful things but find you still haven't found
what your looking for. At least not quite. Here's my thoughts on how to
go about it.
First find yourself a decent search engine. It's a blatent
plug but I use Google
(can you find them :) and I have been very happy so far with the results.But
don't stick with one search engine religiously just for religion's sake.
You might find that other search engines have strong points in regard
to the data you are looking for so it's handy to understand the categorisation
of the information you are looking for. For instance Yahoo has a hierachical type cataloge system
which means you might find it easier to walk through their system looking
for a subject matter that suits your current investigation.
Generally for me I find it is all in the "phrase"
you search for. As many search engines will tell you, carefully select
your keywords and check your spelling. I keep a link handy to an online
dictionary for just this reason.
Also most search engines have advanced search features so
you should look here to find out how best to drive your search engine.
So as an example I was searching for information about composting toilets
and the pathogens that must be dealt with to ensure that the waste matter
is a safe product to handle.
First I entered these words into the search engine compost
manure toilets pathogens and hit enter. OK I got plenty of results,
but I wanted to be sure I was getting the best choice.
So let's say that I wanted to be sure I'd see pages with
the word pathogen more than any other possible
hits. I change the order of the words to give more weight in the search
to pathogens.
pathogens compost manure toilets
Now let's say I am still not satisfied with my results.
I find that there are many pages with pathogens
written on them but I only want to see pages from Australian businesses and
their sites in the domain .AU. So I went to the advanced search page and
entered .au in the "from this domain
only" field and hit enter.
Then when that page came back I looked up in the address
bar and saw the command that had been sent to the search engine to process
my request.
"url:.au" was in
front of my words.
ahaha! I now know how to ask Google to give me pages from
certain domains without haveing to go to the Advanced search page. I just
enter that command before my list of target words.
"url:.au compost manure toilets
pathogens"
You can follow this example to find out how to write your
search criteria so that you get differing results. The advanced page will
let you select date ranges and other criteria for your search.
Good luck in your searching and please email
me should you have any questions or additions for this page.
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