This tutorial teaches students effective search strategies using search engines. It covers tips for modifying search queries to get more relevant results, such as using quotation marks and defining searches. The tutorial also explains how search engines work, stemming, and advanced search options to narrow results. Following the strategies taught should help students improve their search skills and find more useful information for research.

1. Google Yahoo Ask
Bing Excite MSN Live
Search Engines
Search HotBot
ChaCha Effective Searching
Tips and Tricks for Dogpile
Google Yahoo Ask
Bing Excite Google

2. About this Tutorial
Students:
This tutorial will:
• Teach you specific strategies for using search engines
• Teach you how to cut out unnecessary searching
It should take you about 20 minutes to complete.
Faculty:
This tutorial was made using Microsoft PowerPoint 2007.
This tutorial will help students
• Search effectively
• Find more relevant results
• Find more credible results
This tutorial meets the following ACRL standards:
1.1d
1.4a
2.2d

3. What to watch for…
Notes –
These are to let you know
there is important information
you need to know about what
is being covered.

4. A search engine is an online tool that checks
web pages for the search terms you enter
into it. When it comes to search
engines, there are many choices.
There are a few different tips and tricks that
will help get the desired results in all of
them. This includes knowing the benefits of
using certain search options and commands.

5. Most search engines will assume and modify things about a regular sentence. For
example in the sentence:
I want to know the date of the Lunar Landing
A search engine might
ignore the words “I”
and “the”.
In this case you would
want to modify your
search, for example
instead of the above
sentence you may use
this phrase for your
search: Date of Lunar Landing
Though this is not a full sentence, the search engine will recognize the important
words, and give you better results. Better results means better research.

6. It is possible that the search engine may also do some stemming. This means that it
would search for variations of the words in your original search.
Ways to Conserve Energy
Wildlife Conservation Energy Crisis in California
In this example, the search engine
would have read Conserve and Energy
separately, giving unrelated results.
There are advantages and disadvantages to search engine stemming:
• On the one hand, you may be interested in some of the topics the engine includes
with your search, and they may be of some use in whatever research you are doing.
• On the other hand, it may be harder to find what you are searching for when extra
results have been added due to stemming.

7. If you want to avoid stemming, and unwanted results, there are
a couple of tricks to use.
Quotations:
When you use quotations in a search, you will be
telling the search engine to look for those specific
words, and nothing else. This will often lower the
amount of results.
Without quotations:
With quotations, a significantly smaller number of results:

8. For example:
In Title Commands In title: “high school curriculum”
:
This command will tell the
search engine to only give
results that have the words of
the search terms in the title
of the result. You give this
command by typing in title:
before your search terms.

9. To further narrow your results, most search engines have an
Advanced Search option.
These are the advanced
search options on:

10. When searching on Google, there is an option to define your
search. This is helpful when you are searching for something you
don’t understand, or have never heard of before.

11. On most search engines you can also use the Define Command.
This tells the search engine that you want a definition, and the
engine will usually bring it up as the first result.
To use the Define Command, simply type define: and your search
term, like in this example from:

12. We’ve covered just a few of the tricks that can make a search
results more effective. Many search engines also offer things
like images, videos, maps, and more. It can be helpful to use
a variety of search engines, and search on them often to
understand the benefits each one has to offer.
Now you can turn your searching into finding!