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How to use a Search Engine
There are probably alot of you out there that think it is easy to use a search engine, you just type in a word and press search right? WRONG....
Here are some basic tips to make yourself a whiz with search engines;
When you are searching for something in a search engine lets use computer tower firstly you should go to google Australia "www.google.com.au" then as shown below you click on the "pages from Australia".
Now that you have done that it will now restrict you to pages in Australia. The next step is you could just type in computer but that is too broad to get exactly what you want as you can see.
Now what you want to do is refine your search so now type in computer towers you will see that there are fewer results.
There are still 106 000 results though so how do you choose which website to go to? That is what the title, description and URL are for.
Read the two sites that I have shown in the picture below which one stands out to be more related. There is the Bond University or Smithscomputers.
Obviously Smithscomputers is the more appropriate one as the Bond University doesn't sell computer towers.
When searching in google it does not make any difference if you type in upper or lower case. No matter how it has been typed you will always receive the same results. For example if you type smiths computers, Smiths Computers, SmItHs CoMpUtErS or even SMiTHs ComPutERS you will get exactly the same results.
Google does not require you to use "and" between words either. Google does searches for all the websites that include your keywords automatically. However the order in what you type the words will make a difference in the results. So if you were doing a search for a specific monitor don't type computer monitor with an LCD screen and 17" viewable and Samsung Brand". Instead type in Samsung 17" LCD computer monitor
When doing searches in Google note that it ignores common words like "but", "the", "of" and "to". This is because they do not improve the quality of the results that show.
If there is a specific word that you want to get in the results, which may even be a common word you can do the by adding a + sign before the word. (Make sure you add the plus before the word eg road +to nowhere).
If you want to do a search and receive the exact same words in your results as what you have searched for use quotation marks. for example if you type "Integrated 64Mb 3D Graphics" you will get results that have those specific words in order.
Sometimes you want to make sure that a word does not appear in your search this is often used when a word has 2 or more meanings such as (bolt "to secure something" or "to run away suddenly"). If you wanted to focus on the search to secure something into position you can typle something like bolt -run -away. This will make sure that run or away does not appear in your searches.
Some people may of been wondering what does the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in Google do. Well it doesn't give you a jackpot of cash. What it does is take you straight to the most relevant site that Google found for your search. The results page does not appear as it takes you directly to that first site on that list.
This concludes our tutorial. We hope you found "How to use a search engine properly" useful. If there is anything else you would like to know more about email us and we will look into writing a tutorial for you.
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