How Do I Use A Search Engine?
First of all, use your browser to go to the search engine site of your choice. You could start by looking at a few of the search engines I've listed on the Resource Page.
Once at the site, you'll see a box for you to enter your keywords. These are the words which relate to the information you want to find.
Let's suppose you want to find information on Liverpool Football Club in the UK.
You enter the word Liverpool in the box and then click on the on-screen Search button. After a short wait (usually just a few seconds), you're presented with a list of all the websites that contain the word Liverpool and a few lines for each site to give you an idea of what the site is about. With luck, you might spot a suitable looking website straight away - in which case, you can just click on the underlined site name and your browser will take you straight there. Often you won't find what you're looking for immediately but, if you check down at the bottom of the list, you may well find that there are another nine (or more) pages of such lists for you to check out.
This is where web searching can get a bit tedious. For example, your search using the word Liverpool has thrown up lots of sites that are nothing whatsoever to do with Liverpool FC and that you don't want to have to wade through. There are even websites listed about a place called Liverpool in the United States, for Pete's sake! It's not the search engine's fault. You asked for websites about Liverpool and it's listed them for you. What you need to do is learn to be a little more precise about what you're looking for.
How Do I Narrow Down My Searches?
First, you need to decide exactly what it is you are looking for.
In the above example, you were looking for information about Liverpool Football Club. So you could enter Liverpool+football to restrict your search to only those sites which mention Liverpool and football.
Let's suppose you want to find information about the city of Liverpool in the UK but you don't want to look at sites about Liverpool's football club.
Try entering:
Liverpool+UK-football
Translated, that means search for any sites that mention Liverpool and the UK but skip any that mention football.
Let's try a search for Neil Armstrong.
Entering just:
Neil Armstrong
will give you every site that mentions the name Neil or the name Armstrong or both - but not necessarily together.
Now try:
Neil+Armstrong
Now you get a list of sites that mention both names but - did you really want to look at sites about a couple of people called Neil Jones and John Armstrong?
We need to be even more precise.
The trick to searching for a specific name, or phrase, is to use quotes.
Try searching on:
"Neil Armstrong"
Now that's more like it!
Want to look for information relating to the love scene in Romeo and Juliet?
Try using:
"But soft, what light through yonder window shines"
Using quotes restricts your search to those sites which contain an exact phrase or name. But, remember to use upper and lower case letters correctly, Many search engines are case sensitive which means that they will perform different searches, and give different results, for Shakespeare compared to shakespeare.