Searching Techniques
Did you ever search for an item and get an overwhelming number of return sites ( called hits)? The secret in searching is to narrow down the number of hits to a manageable number. There are many sites that do searching (called "search engines"). You probably already have a favorite, but for the purpose of our explanation here we will use Google (www.google.com). The techniques used here should work on most major search engines.
Example 1: The annual family get together is approaching and we need a recipe for Dutch apple pie, so we go to Google and enter the words dutch apple pie recipe. You will probably get in the neighborhood of 1,200,000 hits. If you take the time to sort through some of the hits you will find that some of them have little to do with Dutch apple pie recipes. Why? The search engine went out to the web sites and looked for each individual word, so you received hits for Dutch, hits for apple, hits for pie, and hits for recipe. You are fortunate that Google does list the hits in the order that the ones that they consider most relevant listed first. There is, however a simple way to narrow this down. To stop the search engine (in this case Google) from searching for each individual word, we encase the words in quotes. Now we enter "dutch apple pie recipe" in the search window. Instead of 1,200,000 hits, we now have 5,580. A much more realistic number. We forced the search engine to look for the complete phrase or combination of words in the exact order in which they were entered simply by enclosing the words or phrase in the quotation marks.
Example 2: We just discovered that Uncle Ned was recently diagnosed with diabetes and our Dutch apple pie recipe will not do. We now need to narrow the search to diabetic recipes. We now enter "dutch apple pie recipe" +diabetic into the search window. This tells the search engine to add the word diabetic to the search. You could have also entered "diabetic dutch apple pie recipe" into the search window. On this particular day, using "diabetic dutch apple pie recipe" did not return any results whereas "dutch apple pie recipe" +diabetic returned 1,260 hits. Many of these hits were based solely on the word diabetic, but the recipes that we were looking for appeared at the top of the list. The problem with entering all of the words in quotes was that forced the search engine to return only results that appeared in that EXACT order.
Example 3: We want to find information on a lady with the last name of Deere, first name unknown. If we search for the word Deere, we get 11,200,000 hits, most of these related to the John Deere company. Now we tell the search engine to not return any hits with John Deere in them by entering: Deere -"john deere" this tells the engine to not return hits with john deere in them. This narrows the search down to somewhat over one million hits as the words Deere Company are sometimes used in referring to John Deere. We now enter: deere -"john deere" - company this returns a list that we can manage and we find our lady easily.
Summary: Practice searching using the quotation marks and then incorporate the + and - techniques to further narrow the search. Oh, by the way, if you use Google's advanced search, there is a convenient form to complete that will accomplish the same things. I just find it faster to use the techniques above.