Searching the WWW
General Tips:
    1. Don't just use a single word for your search unless you want very broad and gerneral results. Eg. 'football' will bring you thousands of results including Americang Gridiron, soccer and rugby. If you want Australian Rules Football, you should include those words.

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    2. Use operators - special characters - to make your search more specific.

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        • use +word +word +word to make sure that all three words appear somwhere in each search result.  Eg. +recipe +leek +potato +soup  will return pages that have "Leek and Potato Soup Recipe" and also "Recipe for Potato and Leek Soup". The order of the words doesn't matter.
        • use "    "  around phrases which should be matched exactly. Eg. "australian rules football" will only find that exact phrase.
        • use +word -word to exclude particular kinds of results. Eg. +melbourne +florida will make sure you don't get swamped by information about the USA city Melbourne when what you really want is information about Melbourne in Victoria.
        • combine operators. Eg.  +"waverly park" +AFL

       
    1. Mostly, a good rule is to use only lower case letters in searches. Lower case letters will also 'find' the same word written in upper case on web pages, but if you put upper case, the search engine will only look for upper case matches and ignore the same words if they are written in lower case. Sometimes this is useful, as for example if you are looking for information about the country Turkey and don't want lots of recipes for roast bird.

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    2. The wildcard asterisk * on the end of 'root' words will get you broader results and pick up related topics which you might not have thought of yourself. Eg. bicycl* will find bicycle, bicycles, bicycling and bicyclist. Use singular forms of words rather than plural.



      3. Good places to start your searches:

      In Australia:

      AltaVista Australia: http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au
      Yahoo Australia:  http://www.yahoo.com.au
      Web Wombat: http://203.36.93.62/index.htm
      Anzwers Metasearch: http://www.anzwers.com.au
       

      Overseas:

      AltaVista USA: http://www.altavista.com
      Yahoo USA: http://www.yahoo.com
      Infoseek: http://www.infoseek.com
      GoTo.com: http://www.goto.com
      HotBot: http://www.hotbot.com
      Lycos: http://www.lycos.com
       

      Ready to try it out? Do this searching exercise   

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