Searching for information of the world-wide web

A beginners guide to using search engines, written by Lorna McAusland during her placement period at IFR.

1. First choose a search engine such as Google (www.google.co.uk), Yahoo (www.yahoo.co.uk), or Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.co.uk).
2. Try not to use common words such as ‘to’ and ‘a’ as these will slow down your search and bring you unrelated websites.
3. If you are looking for an exact phrase then use quotation marks and the search engine will search for the exact phrase found in the quotes e.g. “food institute”  will find all web-pages containing the phrase ‘food institute’ not any pages containing the words ‘food’ or ‘institute’ or ‘institute food’.
4. If you want to search for words matching your phrase but are unsure of what to use the asterisk command can act as a ‘wildcard’. For example ‘food*’ searches for the word food and another word linked to it.
5. If you want a mix of 2 different search terms to be brought up by the search engine use the command ‘OR’ (in capitols). For example ‘cheese OR crackers’ will retrieve information on cheese or crackers.
6. You can also exclude results from the search engines search using the ‘NOT’ command or minus sign (-). For example the search phrase ‘omasum NOT abomasum’ (omasum-abomasum) tells the search engine you require websites containing the phrase ‘omasum’ excluding the phrase ‘abomasum’.
7. You can search for an individual title of a webpage through your chosen search engine using the command ‘intitle:’ for example ‘intitle: microbes in meat’ would show pages containing that title.
8. To understand a word better you can use the ‘define:’ query. For example, typing ‘define: nutrition’ will retrieve all the definitions given by websites searched by the search engine.
9. You can ask your search engine to search one site for a specific phrase or word by using the phrase and the query ‘site:’ for example ‘microbial site: www.ifr.ac.uk’ this would give you all the information found about microbial on the IFR website.
10. BEWARE: searching public databases such as www.wikipedia.org. These websites can be altered by any member of the public and so could hold false information.

Related links

• www.google.co.uk
• www.yahoo.co.uk
• www.askjeeves.co.uk