Good search words

Find good keywords and phrases. Do a little brainstorming in advance, and come up with a list of good words and phrases. Try thinking of words an author of a topical web page would use.

Try different searches

Search engines are good at ranking search results, so if you don't find relevant pages on the first 20 - 30 hits, you should try a different search. If you are not happy after two or three searches, you should try a different search engine.

Be specific

If you want to find information about poodles - search for “poodle” and not for “dog”.

Search engines like Google and AltaVista let you search for information on the web by using keywords. Each search will often result in very many hits, with some good hits and very many totally irrelevant ones. To improve your results you may use advanced search techniques to limit and focus your search. It may also be wise to select a couple of search tools and learn how to use them properly.

Search for several words

Enter several words in the search box, without using punctuation marks. This will give you hits on pages where one or more of your words appear. Read more on boolean search technique in the module Finding Books. Ex: NTNU student grade

Search for phrase

If you know the exact wording of a name or a phrase, you can put it in ” ” (quotation marks). That will give you hits for pages where the words appear together and in the same order as you wrote them. Ex: “queen elizabeth”, “cannes film festival”, “god save the queen”.

Searches with +

You ensure that words and numbers are included in the result by adding a + (plus) in front of the search word. Ex: Star Wars episode +1

Searches with -

A - (minus) in front of a word means that this word should not appear in the result. Ex: Venus +planet retrieves all pages on the planet Venus. Venus -planet retrieves Venus in all other contexts.

Boolean search

In most search engines you may use OR between words to search for synonyms. Ex: sport OR athletics

Field search

Combinations with site: or domain: let you limit your search to a specific domain. Ex: +“positions available” +site:ntnu.no

Check the help function in order to see the options available in your search tool.