How to Search the Internet

Most information is found on the Internet by utilizing search engines. A search engine is a web service that uses web robots to query millions of pages on the Internet and creates an index of those web pages. Internet users can then use these services to find information on the Internet.

Actually searching Google is pretty easy. Just type what you’re interested in finding into the search box on the Google web site or into your toolbar! If you’re using a toolbar, as you type, you may see words begin to appear below the toolbar’s search box.

Simple Search allows for keyword searching. You can limit a search to a particular phrase by putting the phrase in quotation marks (e.g. “global warming”). You can also use AND, OR, NOT operators (e.g. cardinals AND baseball). Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to Title, Author/Creator, Subject, or Tag.

According to statistics from Netmarketshare, Statista and StatCounter, the top 5 search engines worldwide in terms of market share are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex.

Google Search operators are combinations of words and symbols that improve your online search results. By focusing on certain keywords and excluding others, they allow you to use Google more accurately and effectively. Search operators can include: Words such as AND or OR.

Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine, with over 70% of the search market share.

The asterisk is a commonly used wildcard symbol that broadens a search by finding words that start with the same letters. Use it with distinctive word stems to retrieve variations of a term with less typing.

Boolean searching is built on a method of symbolic logic developed by George Boole, a 19th century English mathematician. Boolean searches allow you to combine words and phrases using the words AND, OR, NOT (known as Boolean operators) to limit, broaden, or define your search.

You can exclude words from your search by using the – operator; any word in your query preceded by the – sign is automatically excluded from the search results. Remember to always include a space before the – sign, and none after.

Parentheses. Parentheses are used to group words and expressions so that the result of evaluating the expression between the parentheses can be used as part of a more complex query.

There are no special way to search specific symbol, you can type the name or pate the symbol and search for relevant results.

Google uses the same symbol—an asterisk (*)—both as the wildcard character and for proximity searches. The wildcard searches for variations in words (truncation), and can replace a whole word for proximity searches. The asterisk (*) serves as a whole-word wildcard.

Boolean search is a type of search allowing users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) such as AND, NOT and OR to further produce more relevant results. For example, a Boolean search could be “hotel” AND “New York”. This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords.

Truncation, also called stemming, is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings. To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end. The database will return results that include any ending of that root word.

They connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results. The three basic boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.