Search engines are the precision power tools of Internet research. Essentially, they check several million Web pages for the words you want. They may search in a Web page's text, in the page's title, or in the page's hidden meta tags that you don't see. If any part of the page has the words, the search engine puts it in a list for you.
Go to our sample portal, Yahoo. Underneath the top banner there's an empty box with a gray button to the right labeled "Search". That's the connection to Yahoo's search engine. You type words in the box, click "Search", and wait for the magic.
Unfortunately, you must begin your search with the correct words. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for or misspell it really badly, you may never find it. Furthermore, if you search for a very common word, like "dog", you may get thousands of hits. It could take hours to check them all even if you just skim through the list. Finding too many Web sites is almost as bad as finding none at all.
Each portal's search engine is slightly different from the others, but there are a few tricks that will work on most of them.
Your ultimate goal is to get the Web page you're really looking for presented to you in the first 10 or so of the search engine's list.
Try out the Yahoo engine. Type in the words, "Texas history" and click Search. (Tip: capitalization and punctuation don’t matter to search engines, but spelling does.) The Yahoo engine displays a modified form of its directory with several options for you to choose from. Another subject might bring up a display of Web page URLs and a summary of each page's contents. Other search engines might show the page's titles and the first couple of lines of text. All of these are shortcuts to help you find what you want without having to actually open every Web page.
Most engines have an advanced feature, a place where you can read more about how the engine works and get details of how to use that particular engine efficiently. You can see Yahoo's by clicking the words "advanced search" just to the right of the search box. This gives you a couple of options you haven't seen before, but to see the full instructions for Yahoo's search engine, click "Help on Search". The first time you use a new search engine, read its advanced documentation. It'll save you time in the long run.
You may see Boolean operators mentioned. Named for English mathematician George Boole, these are the words and, or, and not. You use them like this: Elvis and Presley, Elvis or Presley, Elvis not Presley. An example of when to use not would be if you were looking for information on the skater named Elvis. In that case, typing Elvis not Presley would strip out the references to The King, although you'd still get all the references to Elvis Costello, Elvis Crespo, etc.
The order you list the words matters. When you enter the words, "fiction and writing" the search engine considers that "fiction" is more important than "writing". If it finds a site with the word "writing" on it 15 times and the word "fiction" 1 time, it will put that page higher in the list than a page that uses the word "writing" 25 times. Put the most important words first.
Search engines will seek all the words you enter. For example, the movie title Dog Day Afternoon gets you all the Web pages with the word dog, all with the word day, and all with the word afternoon in them. There will be thousands and thousands of pages to check. But if you place quotation marks around the words, then the engine searches only for the exact phrase, "dog day afternoon".
Sometimes you may not know exactly how to spell the word you're looking for. That's only a minor problem. For example, say you don't know how to spell the Elvis skater's last name, but you know that it begins with an S. Type in Elvis S. It will be enough for most engines to turn up the name Elvis Stojko for you. (Of course, entering the name Elvis alone will dump a million Web sites into your list. Don't do that.)
The thing to remember is that if you know the first few letters of what you want, the odds are good that the search engine can fill in the rest for you. Try different variations until you succeed. The more accurate letters you can enter up front, the better your odds of success.