Webupon

This is the place for you to find out about tips and tricks on how to use internet search engines, I will write on how you could save time on coursework by finding your information even quicker. For the following text, it will be based around Google, but it can be used on any of the other search engines out there.

After you load up your search engine you are ready to search, so type in what you arte trying to search for, for example: Tips & Tricks. So you have what you want to search for, now with this you are going to be coming up with results that are nothing to do with what you want.

The answer is to be more specific about what you want to search for, Google Advanced Search is designed to help you on this, you can do similar as this on any other search engines by adding key words into what you want to search, so our previous example making it more specific could become: Tips & Tricks About Computers. This narrows down your results and you will be able to find what you are looking for more easily.

Google Advanced Search

The Google Advanced Search makes the whole thing easier. All you have to do is fill in the form that it comes up with, so here is my guide to it:

All These Words: type in words which are crucial to what you are trying to find out.

This Exact Wording or Phrase: put what you are exactly searching for if you are wanting to.

One or more of these words: the definite key words you put here as these will be the basis of the search.

Any of these unwanted words: if you have previously searched and there are words which continuously come up which you don’t want to come up then put them here and they wont come up.

Results per page: this doesn’t really matter unless you have a slow computer, slow computer = put up enough results so then not masses come out at once and not small enough results that you spend ages loading up searches.

Language: any language unless you think that the top matching search will be in a different language.

File Type: This could be a written document or a picture or an adobe, which one do you want to be going on.

Search within a site or domain: this is only for if you want to search one particular site and not have a wide range of results.

Another trick is to put Google and many other search engines is to make sure that at the top of the page the phrase of pages from UK is clicked if you want to have only searches from the UK.

More Tips

Using “” in the search engine makes it search for exactly that phrase, so instead of having the search of: Tips & Tricks, you make it into “Tips & Tricks”. In most search engines writing in capitals AND in the between key words will make the search engine search for sites which include both the words and make the results a smaller number while typing in OR in between your keywords will make the search engine search for sites which have either of those words meaning more results.

Reliability, Accuracy and Bias

When searching on the internet you have always got to be careful about the sites you get information from. You can be sure that official websites will be bias to the thing that the site is about, reliability must be thought about, and can you trust the site? You could check by seeing if they have listed the sources of where they have got their information from, then you could use those places instead, the sites which are unbiased will be trying to give you a balanced opinion to leave you room to make your own judgement.. Accuracy, now that is difficult unless you have a sure fact about one thing and if the site says something different then you need to check through that site. Be careful about the site of Wikipedia as anyone on this site can change the text to make it not accurate and reliable. This is true for nearly the whole web.

On some search engines the first result is not the best site to go on, it is simple for a website owner to get to the top of the searches by paying the search engine, so the only top results are the ones that have paid the most money, but that doesn’t mean that they are any good. If you want data then you want up to date data, so to get to know whether the searched site is up to date there will always be a date of when it was published, so have a look at the date and see if it is up to date enough.