Electronic Search Strategies: Search Engines

Electronic Search Strategies: Search Engines

Best used for: finding specific sites or specific information.

Do you want to know how to USE search engines to actually FIND something ? This is the place!! It contains the world's largest collection of directory and search engine tips, tricks, reviews, and guides. It should be required that everyone visit SearchEngineWatch and read "Search Engine Math" and "Power Searching for Anyone."

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Search Engine Watch  http://searchenginewatch.com/

Search Tips:

• Use more than one search engine;
• Explore each search engine's various search options;
• Don't assume the first hit is the best one;
• If you don't find what you are looking for in the first 25 hits, modify your keywords and search again.

Search engines use software called spiders, Web crawlers, or bots to automatically collect the words on millions of Web pages. These words are fed into a searchable database. So when you search a search engine, you are not searching the Web - you are searching that search engine's index of Web pages collected by its spider in the recent (or not-so-recent) past.

Relevancy software determines in what order hits are listed. Search engines are extremely incomplete in terms of retrieving most of what is available. Also, there is little overlap between the search engines' databases. Therefore, use more than one search engine on a regular basis.

• Visit the Electronic Searching and Keyword Searching  pages for more information and assistance.