Finding information quickly requires that you think about your task beforehand. Adopt a strategy based on what you know about what you're looking for.

• Do you know what general topic the information is related to?
  
  
• Do you know a specific name or title?
  
  
• Do you know one or more qualities or characteristics?
  
  

Links to the Web are created by entering search keywords into the form, selecting the indexes you wish to search, and clicking on the Search button (or hit return). Search results will be listed along with the number of hits.

• Search keywords can be words or phrases. With some search engines, the terms "and", "or" and "not" can be used to create boolean phrases which restrict the search results. For example: biomechanical biomedical and engineering not computing can mean " those documents containing the word biomechanical or biomedical and the word engineering but not the word computing."
  
  
• Search phrases are evaluated left to right.
  
  
• Use differentiating search keywords. Commonly used words make poor search keywords. Extremely common words such as articles and prepositions are so worthless that they are ignored completely.
  
  
• Strive for words which highlight the differences between information sources. Common words, when combined with boolean qualifiers, can be effective. For example,biomedical engineering is a poor search phrase, since positive scores are given to documents containing either word, and both words are fairly ubiquitous. On the other hand, the boolean phrasebiomedical and engineering limits the results to a handful of candidates.

Understand the source and the search results.

• The kind of data an index contains can have dramatic effects on the search process and results.
  
  
• A particular keyword phrase may work wonderfully on one index, and poorly on another.
  
  
• Try to understand how the keywords you specify relate to the results. This helps you form an intuition about the process and the data.
  

Don't count on your memory.

• When you find a place you know you'll need to return to, place a bookmark on that page.

Search Engine page