Refining Your Search

If you search for a general term like house, or cats, or soccer, you'll probably come up with too many results to easily sort through–often millions of results, or "hits"! When this is the case, you can change your search terms a bit to get information that is more relevant to you.

Here are a few tips for refining your searches:

• Include additional words that also describe what you're looking for. For instance, if I'm mainly interested in Bengal cats, I can refine my search by including an additional word, Bengal, in my search. Each additional term will help the search engine narrow in on the specific information you're seeking.
• Putting phrases in quotation marks (for instance, "George Washington") will ensure your search is looking for results for George Washington and not just anything with George or Washington (for instance, George Clooney or Washington, D.C.). This will usually retrieve more relevant results.

Don't just limit yourself to Google. There are numerous search engines on the web, and each uses a slightly different search strategy. If you can't find what you're looking for in one search engine, try another, like Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) or Bing (www.bing.com).

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