Current Students
Search Engines
Search Strategies
- Enter phrases or questions
- You will get better results if you enter a few related words rather than a single word. Thus King Arthur Holy Grail will be more effective that simply Arthur. You may also enter a question: Who found the Holy Grail? Most search engines ignore words like "the" anyway.
- Choose your words wisely
- A generic search phrase like round table will yield too many results if you're trying to find out about Arthur's famous furniture. A better phrase: king arthur knights round table.
- Try and try again
- If you don't get what you're looking for on the first try, don't give up. Try changing the original query by substituting synonyms or related words. Too many results? Add descriptive terms to make your query more precise.
- Put quotes on key phrases
- Put quotation marks around specific, verbatim phrases that you want to find exactly as written: "To be or not to be."
- Get help from operators
- Common tools for linking search words together include the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, and the + and - signs. These operators, recognized by most search engines, help you craft more clearly defined queries. AND links words that must be contained in each returned result: Arthur AND Merlin. If only one of the two words must be found in the results, use OR: Merlin OR Merlyn. NOT or the minus sign inserted before a word, can be used to exclude word that must not appear in the results: Holy Grail -Monty -Python. The plus sign used before a word indicates that the word must appear in the search results: +King +Arthur.
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