The Internet is a vast resource containing information on hundreds of thousands of topics. So how do you find the exact information you are looking for? Search engines provide Internet users with a tool for finding web pages relating to certain keywords, but often give mixed, or incomplete results. There is a secret to searching the Internet; search engines speak a special language. If you take a moment to learn how to talk to a search engine, you can narrow down the results to meet your criteria exactly. Here's how.

Choose the words you search for carefully - Search engines don't really speak English. As a matter of fact, search engines don't speak any language at all. This is why when searching, you should use keywords that best match the subject or content you're looking for, and nothing else. Instead of searching for ‘Show me information on Nevada‘, you should simplify it to the key idea, ‘Nevada'. This will return general information on the state of Nevada. If you're looking for something more specific, like luxury hotels in Nevada, you can type multiple key words into the search engine and narrow down the results. For example, ‘luxury hotel Nevada' will return pages that contain all three of those terms. Notice that it was not necessary to include the word ‘and' in the search. Search engines assume that you want to find pages that contain all of your search terms, so the word ‘and' is rarely, if ever, required.

Most search engines exclude common words automatically - Because some words appear on web sites far too commonly to be included in searches, most search engines ignore them. Words such as "where," "who" and "I" usually are removed from your search before it's conducted. If you want to force the word into the search, you can add a plus sign ‘+' before the word, and it will not be ignored. When searching for information on King Henry the first, you might try searching for ‘King Henry I'. The engine will ignore the ‘I' and return information on all the King Henries that it can find. Search for ‘King Henry +I' and you'll get better results.

Searching for exact phrases - Using quotation marks around key phrases is likely the most powerful tool you have when searching the Internet. For example, If you type the words ‘The Night Before Christmas' into a search engine without quotation marks around it, the engine will return pages that contain those words at any position and in any order they might appear. The engine will return many results that you aren't interested in. By putting quotes around key phrases, you can narrow your search down to pages that contain the exact phrase "The Night Before Christmas".

Filter out what you do not need - The English language contains many words that have two meanings, for example, ‘bass' the musical instrument, and ‘bass' the fish. If you were interested only in the fishing aspect of the word ‘bass' you can filter out the music related sites by using a minus sign ‘-‘ before the word you want to exclude from the search. In our case, we would use the search terms ‘bass -music' to search for information on the fish.

We hope that this information will help you make better use of your Internet, and help you locate the sites that spark your interest. There is so much to enjoy on the Internet, we wanted to make finding it a little easier. Happy surfing!