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COMPUTER REPAIRS
All About Internet Searches..!!
    Because so many documents are being added to the Internet daily, even the best search engines contain less than 25% of Internet documents. Even so this small fraction is information overload when doing a simple search using the sites appearing on this page. Therefore remember to:
    1. Use multiple search engines,
    2. use the correct search tool, and
    3. know how to filter out undesired "hits" using advanced searching techniques.
      • The more specific you can be, the better. Don't worry about redundancy--synonyms can help narrow the field of your search. Leave out nonessential words like prepositions and articles (of, to, and, the, and so on)--most search engines ignore them anyway.
      • Add "Boolean Operators." That's just a fancy name for the words AND, OR, NEAR, AND NOT. Most search engines accept the symbols + and - for AND, and NOT, respectively. By entering these operators between each keyword, it is quite easy to instantly decrease the number of hits, thus achieving a much higher relevance.
      • Surround specific keywords with quotation marks. This requires the search engine to locate the EXACT PHRASE in order for it to be returned as a "hit."
      • Use wildcards such as * to include extra letters following the keyword letters entered. (baseball*)
      • Use the title: operator to search for keywords and keyphrases in the titles of documents. (title: "baseball trading cards")
      • Another operator is links: used to find the number of links that point to a site (links: www.catmarket.com). This is for all you aspiring web developers.
      • See the article Search Features Chart to see all the operators and the sights they work on.
      • See the article Search Engine Math learn how to easily add, subtract and multiply your way into better boolean searches.
      • See the article Power Searching For Anyone which lists power searching commands. For those of you that haven't had enough yet.
    When doing a Web search I recommend using the search tools appearing below in the order listed:
    (all links will open in a new browser window so you will not "lose" this Internet Search page.)
    1. Yahoo!
        Yahoo! is a Web directory which means it has less content than a search engine but the content is organized by humans into meaningful sections with highly-relevant links. One can easily navigate from general topics to more detailed sub-topics without having to use any advanced filtering techniques. Because humans enter site links there is far less content and newer sites (<6 months old) do not always appear.
    2. HotBot
        HotBot makes advanced searching a snap by integrating a Web form in its search. The visitor selects choices such as "any words, all words, or exact phrase", # of hits returned per page, dates to be searched, content type, returned hit description, and more. After making these selections, one click quickly filters out non-relevant hits that would have been returned from a simple search.
    3. AltaVista Raging Search
        AltaVista is a powerful search engine if one knows how to use advanced searching techniques. Two of the most useful features are the ability to do a search of just titles of Web pages and to search for Web graphics, video, and audio files.
    4. Go2net
        Go2net searches the search engines and returns hits that appear on any of the search engines in its database. After checking the sites above it is always a good idea to search here to see which other search engines may be useful for a particular search.

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