Lesson 7: Basic Search Tips
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I highly encourage you to go to the actual tutorial site and complete lesson seven on your own. There are a lot of great tips there. In fact, I am going to print out lesson seven and keep it by my computer so I can refer to it when I'm using search engines. Some of the tips included in this lesson are using plus and minus signs to force their inclusion/exclusion in searches, using double quotation marks to make sure the words in the set are searched exactly as they are entered, using truncation and wild cards, combining phrases and keywords, and putting the most important words first in the string.
At then end of the lesson are some quick tips for Boolean Searching. The assignment for this lesson required me to choose one of the examples for Boolean Searching and try it as a search on Google's advanced search page. I was a little confused as to how to do this, so this is the only assignment out of the tutorial that I wasn't able to complete. If you figure it out, come by the library or email me and let me know how it goes.
Lesson 1 Search Engines Lesson 2 Metasearch Engines Lesson 3 Subdirectories Lesson 4 Library Gateways
Lesson 5 Evaluating WebPages Lesson 6 Creating a Search Strategy Lesson 7 Basic Search Tips
Lesson 8 Boolean Logic Lesson 9 Field Searching Lesson 10 Troubleshooting Lesson 11 Clusty Search Engine