A Search Engine is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.
The top 10 Search engines:
1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. Search.com
4. Altavista
5. Excite
6. Lycos
7. AllTheWeb
8. Metacrawler
9. Dogpile
10. Go.com
You know when you search for a particular topic on Google and it brings you numerous insignificant facts, making it difficult for you to get the information you need. Well, you can control the kind of information a search engine will give when you try to search. Here is how,
- Use unique, specific terms: It is simply amazing how many Web pages are returned when performing a search. You might guess that the terms “Blue Dolphin” are relatively specialized. A Google search of those terms returned 2,440,000 results! To reduce the number of pages returned, use unique terms that are specific to the subject you are researching.
- Use the minus operator (-) to narrow the search: How many times have you searched for a term and had the search engine return something totally unexpected? Terms with multiple meanings can return a lot of unwanted results. The rarely used but powerful minus operator can remove many unwanted results. For example, when searching for the insect caterpillar references to the company Caterpillar, Inc. will also be returned. Use Caterpillar -Inc to exclude references to the company, this will help refine the search and bring specific answers
- Use quotation marks for exact phrases: When you’re searching for a phrase, use quotation marks. Using Quotations marks around a phrase will only return will return only those exact words in that order. Example: “Mother and Daughter”
- Don’t use common words and punctuation: Common terms like a and the are called stop words and are usually ignored.
- Capitalization: Most search engines do not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase, even within quotation marks.So, Art, art, ART, “art” are all the same
- Drop the suffixes: It’s usually best to enter the base word so that you don’t exclude relevant pages. For example,bird and not birds, walk and not walked.
