The Rolling Stones said, "you can’t always get what you want." This statement is definitely true of Internet searches. You type in a search term and get 1,089,045,000 results back from your query. How useful is that?
To get decent results from a search, it helps to know a couple of tricks. Different search engines use different search terms to limit your results, so check the help page. However, the following common techniques work in Google, Yahoo, and Alta Vista.
1. Use the plus sign (+) for multiple terms. For example, suppose I want to find out about samoyed dog breed rescue groups. I could go to my favorite search engine and type in +samoyed +dog +breed +rescue. In this case, the engine will return only pages that have all those terms. The plus sign means the word has to be in the page. Conversely, a minus sign means that I don’t want pages that include a particular term. This can be helpful if you get returned a lot of pages from a site you aren’t interested in.
2. Another helpful technique is to try searching for terms in quotation marks. So you might put "dog breed rescue" in quotes and see if you get more meaningful results.
3. Or you can use a combination. When I was researching articles written by a particular veterinarian about thyroid problems in dogs, I searched for her name in quotations with a plus sign in front, along with thyroid with a plus sign in front of it (+"Jean Dodds" +thyroid). This technique is useful for looking up people’s names, especially if they aren’t particularly common.
If you are still having trouble finding information, you may need to try a specialized search engine. For example, the FindLaw site (www.findlaw.com) is a search engine devoted to researching legal information. Similarly, the U.S. Government’s FirstGov (www.firstgov.gov) site exists to help you navigate many government resources available on-line. The Search Engine Guide (http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html) has a searchable directory of specialized search engines, so you can find the right search engine to do the job.