HW:
The web may see like a vast ocean when you come to find something you need. Thankfully, search engines can help turn ocean's information into small pools that make finding information easier. This is web search strategies in Plain English.
Before we dive in, let's talk a bit about the how search works on the web. Search engines go out and try to account for every word on every webpage. All these information has been organized for easy reference. When you search for a word, the search engine finds all the pages where the word appears and displays them in a search results.
Usually, the pages that appear highsten search results have lots of other web pages linking to them. Each link access vote to say this maybe a good resource.
The problem is there are often too many results. You need a way to reduce the number of results, so you can find what you need. Let's look at how this works. Say you are looking for a specific kind of fish, and this represent all the websites on the web. Searching for fish doesn't help much, there are way to many results. You need be more specific. Try to imagine an exact fish and describe in the search box. You see that each word you use get you closer to what you need. You do this for any website by imagining a website that has your answer. What's the title of the page? What words appear on? If you put those words in the search box, you will get closer to find answers.
But to be a smart searcher, you should know some basic short cats. Let's say you are looking for words that appear together like a fraze or quote, an example is searching for information on sand sharks. If you search for it like this, the search engine looks for pages with sand and sharks. To get better results put quotes around the words like this, it limits the results to be exact phrase.
Here's another short cut. Words often have mutable meanings, consider the word "molet" which is both a fish and a hair style. A search from molet make you a number of results about hair style, but few about the fish. To remove the results about hair, place a hyphen or monosign, just before the word you want exclude, which means show me the pages about molet, but take away results relating to hair.
By been specific and using words in simples that remove use information, you can find exactly what you need and keep the web from swolning you whole. |