One of the best ways to find relevant information on the world wide web is with the use of search engines. Search engines are huge indexes that attempt to include each word from every page on the web in their databases. Due to the enormous and ever-growing quantity of web pages, this task becomes nearly impossible.
In order for search engines to compile and organize this huge amount of data, they make use of various computer programs called robots, spiders, and crawlers. These tools trace words or hyperlinks (those underlined colored bits of text that direct you somewhere else when you click on them) across the web.
While these programs cruise from one site to the next, they index Web documents and send the results back to a database. When a user enters a search term, an enormous database is checked and the results are then listed by their relevance.
Because there is so much information available on the web, these results may amount to several thousand listings. This is not a problem if what you are looking for shows up among the first 30 or so hits; however, when this is not the case, most users give up.
So how can you find the information you are looking for in the first 30 links? Follow these tips:
Be specific
Don't be afraid to tell a search engine exactly what you are looking for.
For example, if you want information about Windows XP bugs, search for "Windows XP bugs," not "Windows." Or even better, search for exactly what the problem is: "I can't install a USB device in Windows 98 . " You will be surprised at how often this works.
Use the plus symbol (+) to add to your search
Sometimes, you want to make sure that a search engine finds pages that have all the words you enter, not just some of them. The + symbol lets you do this. For example , imagine you want to find pages that have references to both President Bush and Saddam Hussein on the same page. You could search this way: Bush + Hussein. Only pages that contain both words would appear in your results.