1. It doesn't normally matter whether you type your query in capitals or lower-case letters.

2. There are various ways to narrow the search. The most common method uses symbols. Say you want to buy a puppy. Typing in German Shepherd is a potential problem as a search engine will look for matches with both German and Shepherd. If you put "German Shepherd" in quotation marks the engine will only search for the entire phrase. Adding a + sign before a word means that must be included in the search, a - sign means it must not be included. A * sign tacked on the end of a word asks the engine to search for other similarly spelled words.

"German Shepherd" +breed* entered into Yahoo initially brings up 254 site matches and 10 category matches plus the message:

"You have just searched the whole of Yahoo!.
Try searching Yahoo! for just UK sites or Irish sites to narrow your results."

Clicking on UK Sites reduces it to one category which contains three German Shepherd breeders and four site matches, two of which are repeats.

3. As each site has its own unique address, try guessing. Start with "www." then add the company name, and finish with ".com" if it's American, ".co.uk" if it's British, ".gov" is a government site, ".org" for non-profit organisations and either ".ac" or ".edu" for academic institutions. Be warned "whitehouse.com" is altogether sleazier than "whitehouse.gov".

4. If you find a site which you think you'll want to come back to, click on Favorites and slide down to Add page to Favorites. The location of the site is now stored on your computer and available by clicking on Favorites, sliding down to the item and clicking on it. You can tidy your list of favourites by sorting them into folders for each subject.

5. Searching can take a long time and can become addictive. You only need to search when you're not sure where to find something. If you know the address of a website just type it in and go straight there. Of course, any website names or addresses written in green in this Guide can be clicked on, and you will be taken online directly to that site.

Page last revised: 22 Jul 2001 23:52 GMT