There are several search strategies and guidelines you can employ to narrow your search and get the specific information you are seeking:

1. Be ultra specific
2. Use quotes around groups of words to indicate that you want to find a specific phrase
3. Use lowercase letters; most search engines are case sensitive

Operators are used to tell the engine what type of action to perform on a keyword in a search statement. There are some operators common among all engines and directories and some specific to a particular engine. Each engine and directory has a help page, which explains the syntax for that particular engine or directory.

If you are specifying more than one keyword, searching is a bit trickier than selecting a general topic. Because different search engines require different uses of punctuation

1. ("), operators (+), and
2. Boolean Logic expressions (AND, OR),

you should check the help page of the search engine you are using.
Click the View Table link above to see some search operators and if they are specific to a particular engine.
The next lesson wraps up this lesson.