How can you find the kinds of information you're seeking on the World Wide Web? There's so much data out there!

You can use search tools to hunt for material that interests you. Although they may seem intimidating at first, they're fairly easy to use. However, there is no tool that searches the entire Internet! Search engines, meta-search engines, and subject archives all work differently.

The following hints apply to the majority of search tools.

• Boolean searching (looking for multiple terms) is usually achieved by using a "+" for terms you want to include and a "-" for terms you wish to exclude. For example, Ball +State -University would find web pages that include the words Ball and State but not the word University.
• Phrase searching is achieved by enclosing the phrases in quotation marks. For example, "Ball State" would search for the phrase; Ball State (without quotation marks) would search for web pages that included both words but not necessarily in that order.
• Most are case sensitive so use lowercase.
• Use capital letters for the boolean operators AND, NOT, and OR.
• Truncation (shortening) is achieved by the use of the symbol *. A search for anima*, for example, would find pages that included both animal and animation.
• Place the most important keywords first in the string of terms.
• Enclose OR terms in parentheses. For example, (Ball OR State) AND University would search for web pages that included either Ball University or State University; the search results would thus include both Ball State University and Indiana State University.
• Terms in parentheses are searched first. For example, (dogs OR wolves) AND "siberian husk*" NOT (breeding OR whelping) would first find pages that have either the terms dogs or wolves, then exclude those pages with either of the terms breeding or whelping, then include only those pages remaining with the phrase siberian husk* in them.
• Know the default settings and stopwords for the search tool. That is, what form does the search tool use if you do not specify an operator? Does it interpret Ball State as Ball +State or as Ball OR State? Stopwords are words like a and the that most search tools ignore.