5  Improving your searches

  • The more specific the entry you provide for a search engine, the more relevant the resulting webpages that it will return to you.
  • If you search for ‘beach’, you will be presented with all the webpages that the search engine has listed with a connection to beaches. If you are only interested in pictures, you may find that you are not interested in many of the websites which may be selling holidays or showing videos of beach activities.
  • Most search engines provide you with an option to narrow your search to a particular type of webpage:
Figure 6
  • The Google search engine provides the option to narrow your search down to images, maps, videos or news, as well as providing more advanced search options using ‘search tools’.
  • You can also be more specific in your search by providing more information for the search engine. For example, maybe you wish to find images of beaches in the UK during the winter, so you could narrow your search down by entering ‘UK beaches in winter’ and selecting an image search.

Activity: Search engines

Watch the following video explaining how to search effectively using a search engine:

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What did you learn while watching the video?

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Answer

Some words have different meanings, so you may be surprised by the results you get. You need to think about what you are asking the Internet to search for and select your search terms carefully. Adding words together improves Internet searches – think about how you can do this to remove or reduce the number of useless results.

4  Searching the web

6  Activities