What kind of website returns many search engine results?

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Using search engines

With billions of websites online today, there is a lot of information on the Internet. Search engines make this information easier to find. Let's look at the basics of using a search engine, as well as some techniques you can use to get better search results.

Watch the video below to learn more about searching the Web.

There are many different search engines you can use, but some of the most popular include Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. To perform a search, you'll need to navigate to a search engine in your web browser, type one or more keywords—also known as search terms—then press Enter on your keyboard. In this example, we'll search for recipes.

After you run a search, you'll see a list of relevant websites that match your search terms. These are commonly known as search results. If you see a site that looks interesting, you can click a link to open it. If the site doesn't have what you need, you can simply return to the results page to look for more options.

Most browsers also allow you to perform a web search directly from your address bar, although some have a separate search bar next to the address bar. Simply type your search terms and press Enter to run the search.

Search suggestions

If you don't find what you're looking for on the first try, don't worry! Search engines are good at finding things online, but they're not perfect. You'll often need to try different search terms to find what you're looking for.

If you're having trouble thinking of new search terms, you can use search suggestions instead. These will usually appear as you're typing, and they're a great way to find new keywords you might not have tried otherwise. To use a search suggestion, you can click it with your mouse, or select it with the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Refining your search

If you're still having trouble finding exactly what you need, you can use some special characters to help refine your search. For example, if you want to exclude a word from a search, you can type a hyphen (-) at the beginning of a word. So if you wanted to find cookie recipes that don't include chocolate, you could search for recipes cookies -chocolate.

You can also search for exact words or phrases to narrow down your results even more. All you need to do is place quotation marks (" ") around the desired search terms. For example, if you search for recipes "sugar cookies", your search results will only include recipes for sugar cookies, instead of any cookies that happen to use sugar as an ingredient.

These techniques may come in handy in certain cases, but you probably won't need to use them with most searches. Search engines can usually figure out what you're looking for without these extra characters. We recommend trying a few different search suggestions before using this method.

Content-specific searches

There may be times when you're looking for something more specific, like a news article, picture, or video. Most search engines have links at the top of the page that allow you to perform these unique searches.

In the example below, we've used the same search terms to look for images instead of websites. If you see an image you like, you can click to visit the website it originally came from.

You can use the extra search tools to narrow down your results even more. These tools will change based on the type of content you're looking for, but in this example we can filter our images by size, color, image type, and more. So if you wanted to find cookies with pink frosting, you could search for images that are mostly pink.

Advertisements

One final thing to note: Most search engines include advertisements with search results. For example, you can see advertisements at the top of the search results below.

These ads are based on your search terms, and they often look similar to other search results. While they may be useful in some cases, it's usually more helpful to focus on the actual search results.

For even more search tips, check out our Search Better tutorial.

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One of the exciting aspects of the Internet is that it allows you to find information that may otherwise be difficult or near impossible to obtain through the use of search engines. There are three main types of search engines, web crawlers, directories, and sponsored links. Search engines typically use a number of methods to collect and retrieve their results. These include:

Crawler databases. The search engine sends out many 'crawlers' which trawl the Web randomly, following links and indexing page content as they go. Some common crawlers are the GoogleBot and MSNBot which power Google and Bing.

Human-edited directories. Directories are human-maintained indexes of websites organized into a comprehensive hierarchy. To add your site to a directory you must submit it to an editor who reviews it first. Many directories charge a fee for inclusion, but the Open Directory Project is a popular free service.

Sponsored links. Sponsored links give you a way to pay to have your site included in search results. When a user searches for one of your chosen keywords, your site will appear usually in a separate section from the main results. On Google these sites appear at the top of the list separated from the main results.

Here is an example of crawler and sponsored link results using Yahoo.

The blue shaded area is sponsored links and the results below this area are crawler based results.

The parts of a Crawler-Based search engine

Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.

Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant.

Searching Across Sites

List searches present the user with a list of categories relating to the specific information being researched. By ‘drilling down’ through categories and sub-categories you will eventually get to specific pages that should be relevant to your search. The risk is that if the user gets the wrong category, important information may be missed.

Most list services provide a search box as well so you can still do a text search for your subject but can limit it to the category you are currently looking in. Popular examples of this type of service include Yahoo!, Lycos and LookSmart.

The keyword search gives the user a search box and then uses powerful text search tools to find all pages that contain that information.

The better search engines have very intelligent search methods and Google (one of the most popular) can even detect if you might have spelled a keyword incorrectly in your search string.

Some text search services are adding category searches as well to improve your search capability. Popular examples of this search service are Google and AltaVista.

What are Meta-search engines? How do they work?

Finally the meta-search engines are services that will put your search through a number of more popular search engines. This will hopefully improve your search by finding pages or files that are contained in one search service and not another – Dogpile is an example of this type of service.

In a meta-search engine, you submit keywords in its search box, and it transmits your search simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages. Within a few seconds, you get back results from all the search engines queried. Meta-search engines do not own a database of Web pages; they send your search terms to the databases maintained by search engine companies.

Meta-search engines can be less reliable as most of them tend to return results from smaller and/or free search engines and miscellaneous free directories that are often small and highly commercial.

However Dogpile does access the larger search engines and also offers a unique parallel mode for viewing and comparing each search engine’s results. This is useful to see how little/much they overlap.

Alternative Search Tools

HotBot provides easy access to the web's three major crawler-based search engines: Yahoo, Google and Teoma. Unlike a meta search engine, it cannot blend the results from all of these crawlers together. Nevertheless, it's a fast, easy way to get different web search "opinions" in one place. http://www.hotbot.com

Use the topic “science education curriculum” using Dogpile at http://www.dogpile.com/ .

Compare the results of your Dogpile results to those of Google or another search engine.

• What are the advantages you can see using Dogpile instead of one of the other search engines?
• What are the disadvantages of only using Dogpile?
• Look at HotBot and see how your search results vary.

Becoming familiar with several search engines will help you quickly find the information you are looking for by using the best search tool.