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To search precisely - How to combine search criteria

Thanks to the use of a search engine, searching for information and sources is quite simple. We will use GOOGLE, one of the most popular engines, to practice on.

Try to type one or several key words (the words or sentence that best describes the information you are searching) in the search box, then hit "Enter" or click on the button "Search". For example:

After a few seconds the search engine displays a page summarising the results. In the picture on the right you can see the list of what it could find by searching the word "Venice".

In order to obtain valid results you have to be very careful while typing in the right search items!

Start from the most obvious solution: if you are looking for general information about Venice, try Venice.

It is often advisable to use a combination of several search words.

To search precisely, you can apply a few tricks in order to combine a few criteria and narrow down your search.

If, for example, you are contemplating a trip to Venice, you will get more specific results by typing in holidays venice together, instead of holidays or Venice separately. Typing holidays venice St. Mark’s you will get more and better results.

You might question if your search terms are specific enough. For example, it would be better to search hotel Canal Grande; it will probably deliver better results than hotels in Venice.

The order in which the terms are typed influences the search results. To further narrow down the search just include more terms. For example, if you are thinking about a holiday in Venice, simply type holidays Venice.

Searches in search engines are NOT case sensitive and consider all letters typed as lower case letters, despite how they are typed in the search box. For example, whether you type jack lemmon, Jack Lemmon or JaCk LeMmOn, you will always get the same results.

The search engine ignores common characters and words such as, for example, "where" and "how" as well as some numbers and single letters, because they tend to slow down the search without improving the results.

If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign before it (make sure you include a space before the "+" sign).

Another way to narrow down a search is to type a complete sentence; you just need to add quotation marks before and after the group of words.

Words of common use that are in the sentence (eg. how and where) will be included in the search.