Searching The Internet
Did you ever do a Web search and get too many results? Or be unable to find what you want? It could be that you aren't asking the search engine to look for the right terms. Here are some tips to help you find the website you want.
Before you even start, think about what you want. Suppose you want information about birds. Do you want birds in general, or tropical birds in South America? If it's the latter, don't just type birds. Try tropical birds South America instead. Or if parrots are what you really want, try typing that first.
If you type in more than one word, most search engines will assume that you want only websites that show ALL the words. So pet parrots will work fine if you want only sites that have both those words somewhere.
Sometimes you may want websites with just ONE of the words. This can happen when there are different words for the same idea or when it is hard to figure out the best word to use. Some search engines will let you handle this by using OR in capital letters. For example, parakeets OR budgerigars.
If you want an exact phrase or title, just put quotation marks around your entry. To find websites that mention the fifth Harry Potter book, you can type "Order of the Phoenix."
You may want to remove certain information from your search. What if you need to read about parrots in the wild but not as pets? You can eliminate sites with the word pet by adding a hyphen (as a minus sign) right in front of the word pet: parrots -pets. If a search gives you too many things, you can go back and use a minus sign to get rid of a word that crops up a lot in sites you do not want.
Most search engines will let you search within categories such as "Images" or "News." If you want to see pictures of parrots, you can enter parrots and click on "Images." Or, if you want to know if something about parrots is in the news right now, you can enter parrots and click on "News" for recent stories.
Some search engines give you a choice of making an Advanced Search. This may let you to do certain things easily, such as look for recent websites or for certain words that appear in the TITLE of the site. This can help narrow your search a lot. For example, lots of sites mention parrots, but only a smaller number will be about parrots and have that word in the title.
Each search engine has its own shortcuts and special keywords you can use to help find the right website. To find out more about these, go to the "Search tips" section.
Computadoras e Internet: Buscando en Internet (Spanish Version)