Information Accessing Helpful Hints ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ Here are some tips for locating information on the Internet or as some folks say, "The World Wide Web". How to Search using Yahoo or any other search engine. Search engines allow searching using key words or phrases. Most are case-sensitive, so remember to capitalize a query (search words). For example, when looking up information on the capital of the United States, be sure to capitalize the first word of each proper name. The White House or a persons name such as Thomas Jefferson would be examples. Not all search engines use the same rules. Seek the HELP section and rules if you have problems with a search using a particular search engine. Connecting two words or phrases using Plus (+) and minus (-) signs may well the search engine to identify the information you need. Boolean searching using AND, OR, or NOT terms will also help the search engines find your information more readily. Both of these techniques for searching will be defined below. Quotation Marks " " - Use quotation marks to words or phrases to define for the search engine that you looking for those words or phrases in documents. Example: "missions of California" Plus (+) - Use a plus sign in front of a word to tell the search engine you wish to find more than one word or phrase in the documents retrieved. Example: +Japan +history ( history of Japan). If you type Japan + history, you may only receive information about history and not Japan. Minus (-) - If you use a minus sign in front of a word, the search engine will NOT retrieve documents with that word. Example: football -history, -rules (football, but not rules or history). Using Boolean Terms - tells the search engine to look for or not look for words in documents. Boolean operators are AND, OR, or NOT. These operators must appear in ALL CAPS with a space on each side. AND - Use AND to find two or more words in a document. Example: bears, grizzly, AND movie OR - Use OR to join words together in a search. Example: dog, OR puppy AND NOT - Use AND NOT to exclude a word from a search. Example: wolves AND NOT zoo ( ) - Use parenthese to group portions of Boolean searches together to get a more complicated search. Example: reptiles AND (alligators OR snakes) NOTE: Some sites you visit may allow you to do a search besides clicking on hyper text words on the sites home page. Boolean and plus or minus search terms may help you locate the information for you. Look for that sites HELP section for searching if you come upon trouble searching. Return to the Library Information Center Return to the Maywood Homepage