If you wish to learn more about search engines, try these:

● How Do Search Engines Work?
From the library of University of California at Berkeley, this is a good summary of much that has been discussed above.

● Searchengines.com
Look for the orange tabs on the left labeled "Search Engine Listings" and "How to Search the Net."

● Search Engine Watch
This has some good "Tutorials" in the "Resources" section.

● Search Engine Showdown
Under "Search Engine Chart" is "Features," which gives technical searching information about various search engines.

Google: Practical Skills

Google Tricks and Tips

You now have a general theoretical understanding of how Google works.  But you need more practical skills.

Here are some tips for searching.

• Use a plus sign ( + ) to make Google (and many other search engines) look for a common word such as "why."  For example, you want to find information about a group you've heard about called "why war."  Google (and some other search engines) will include "why" in the search if you put the plus sign in front: +why war.

• Use a minus sign ( - ) to exclude a word from a search.  For example, if you were researching collies but did not want to work through hits on border collies, enter this: collies -border.

• Enclose words in quotation marks to make Google search for a phrase, not just words individually.  Sometimes Google does this on its own, but not always.  For example , suppose that you knew a line from a poem and wanted to find it: "how well did I behave".  Without quotation marks, the poem by A. E. Housman does not show up; with them, it does.  (Of course, if you knew it, you could focus the search by adding the poet's name―but not inside the quotation marks.)

• Do a site search to limit your search to a particular domain.  For example, you can limit your search to the academic domain by adding this to your search terms: site:.edu.  Why do this?  Because college and university sites, perhaps more than any other domain, provide solid and reliable information, based on the professional standards of the various academic disciplines.  Other examples of site limiting would be site:.org for non-profit sites or site:.gov for government sites.

One good way to improve your skills with a search engine is to look at its help screens.  All of the above information--and much more--is available in Google's help screens. 

Another way to improve web-searching skills is to study one of the many good analyses of search engines.  These include detailed comparisons and descriptions of search-engine features and tips on searching.  Several of these are listed in a section on "Search Tools Features & Evaluations on OCC Libraries' Internet Search Page (which is one of the major links on the OCC Libraries Home Page).