SEARCHING THE WEB
There are millions of pages on the Web, finding the one you want can be very, very difficult - but don't worry. This page reveals the little known secrets to searching the Internet and the WWW quickly and efficiently using some easy to remember rules. Follow these and you will get the right pages every time and never have to wade through lists of useless links again.

Better still - these rules work for any search engine or web directory!

The following examples use the excellent "Ask Jeeves for Kids" search engine which has a massive "knowledge" of education related sites and in built filtering. And even more cleverly it uses several other major search engines to improve it's accuracy. Awesome!

RULE 1
Use + signs to tell the search engine exactly what you are looking for.
A search engine is stupid! - if you are looking for information on the city of Chester in the UK, you might, like most people, simply type chester and hope for the best.
Whoops !!! Not quite what we wanted.
 
Let's try that again.....
This time we will tell the search engine that we only want pages that have the both the words Chester and UK in them - We do this by placing a + sign in front of each word.
(Note: Always use capital letters for particular keywords otherwise you will get "chesterfield, Manchester, etc.)
Click "Ask!" and off it goes......
Much better..... Think of all the time you have saved!
RULE 2
"Use speech marks to search for phrases"
If you use speech marks around phrases, all search engines will only look for pages containing this exact phrase. This is really useful. For example - lets try a search on Ancient Greeks......
(note the speech marks)
 
Now they look like good links and because of the phrase based search there are no Greek restaurants, and holiday offers to confuse things!
RULE 3
Use Website filters to screen out rubbish
Altavista is a quick and powerful search engine that has a password protected Family Filter built in. Yahooligans & AskJeeves for kids are very similar but have special children's sections and higher security.
Let's try a search for Literacy Hour ideas - note the use of speech marks.
Moments later.........
290 Pages, all about "Literacy Hour" - sorted!
3 simple rules to better surfing?
Try one of these superb Search Engines right now!!!
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 Screenshots - ŠAsk Jeeves, Inc. - ŠAltavista, Inc.