General Tips for searching the web.
Despite differences in each search engine's tools, there are tools that many search engines have in common. The following tools can help narrow your search:
Quotation marks: Sometimes you can add characters to your words or phrases to more closely define your intentions for the search engine. For example, enclosing a multiword phrase in quotation marks tells the search engine to list only sites that contain those words in that exact order.
Plus and minus signs: If you type a plus sign (+) directly in front of a word, you are indicating that the word or phrase must appear in the search results (for example, Hotels +San +Francisco). Similarly, a minus sign (-) indicates that the word or phrase should not be included in the search results (Cars -Ford).
Boolean operators: Boolean operators include AND, OR, AND NOT, and parentheses. To work, these operators must appear in ALL CAPS and with a space on each side.
AND - Similar to the plus sign, AND indicates that the documents found must contain all the words joined by the AND operator. For example, to find documents that contain the words wizard, oz, and movie, enter wizard AND oz AND movie.
OR - Documents found must contain at least one of the words joined by OR. For example, to find documents that contain the word dog or the word puppy, enter dog OR puppy.
AND NOT - Similar to the minus sign, using AND NOT indicates that the documents found cannot contain the word that follows the term AND NOT. For example, to find documents that contain the word pets but not the word dogs, enter pets AND NOT dogs.
Parentheses - Parentheses are used to group portions of Boolean queries together for more complicated queries. For example, to find documents that contain the word fruit and either the word banana or the word apple, enter fruit AND (banana OR apple).
Title search - This feature enables you to restrict searches to the title portion of web documents. For example, typing title:Mars or t:Mars will retrieve all documents that have the word Mars in their title.
Search engines
HotBot.com is rated the number one search engine by PC Magazine, PC Computing, Internet World, and a host of other industry publications. HotBot has a database of more than 110 million documents that are updated on a daily basis.
Web Directory Use Netscape Web Directory by Excite to find exactly the web sites you need. Just browse through the lists of topics and subtopics to narrow your search. Excite.com
GoTo.com GoTo provides users with a fast, easy, and friendly way to find relevant web sites on any topic. The simple, uncluttered home and search pages provide a straightforward way for visitors to find what they are looking for. By using various methods of ranking sites, GoTo guarantees that the listings returned are appropriate and relevant to each query.
AOL NetFind Find whatever you're looking for on the Web quickly and easily.
Mining Co Expert Guides The Mining Co. network of GuideSites for over 500 topics goes far beyond lists of links. Sites for each topic are created by an actual human being -- expert Mining Co. Guides -- qualified subject specialists from across the Net and around the world. They provide hand-picked links and up-to-date site reviews; they post feature articles, publish newsletters, lead discussions, recommend books, and more, making each GuideSite both a great starting point and a great community destination.
WebCrawler.com WebCrawler is a "natural language" search engine. It has an index that is updated daily and includes WebCrawler Select site reviews.
Other examples include Yahoo.com, Infoseek.com, Altavista.digital.com, etc. Pick one you like and think of some key words that fit your search.
Mac users only. Recent versions of the Mac OS have included Sherlock. This engine will actually search several other engines at the same time thereby increasing the coverage of any particular search. Data will be returned with %relevance scores for each site. This is a very userful Mac-specific tool.
These tips were adapted from a number of sources on the web.