The Internet is a big place, plain and simple. At times, it can seem hard to navigate your way from one place to another. You aren’t alone; thousands of Americans have gotten Internet search help through online classes and tutorials. Reading this will hopefully provide you with some tips for Internet search. Help is close at hand, learn how to search better, how to get what you are looking for faster, and how to protect yourself while online.

Internet Search Help Tip #1: Understanding Search Results

There is a lot of information on the Internet. Search help is common because it helps people make sense of the information. Sifting through your results may seem like an endless task, but knowing what .com and .org means will help you find what you want faster. For example, if you are looking for information on the White House, you do not want whitehouse.com. Why? Read on:

• .com-a commercial business site
• .org-mostly non-profit U.S. based sites
• .edu-educational sites, mostly for colleges and universities
• .mil-U.S. military and related agency sites
• .gov-U.S. governmental or non-military
• .net-networks, internet service providers and organizations 

 
If you are looking to use the Internet as a research tool, understanding URL endings will help you assess whether or not your site is a credible source. If you need a credible military site, chances are a .com site will not provide you with the best information possible.

Internet Search Help Tip #2: Searching

Searching. It’s a big deal. There are many great search-engines, like Yahoo! and Google. But the Internet is huge, how can you be sure to find what you want, without having to sift through all the things you didn’t mean to find?

In your next Internet search, help the search engine by using the following:

1)      Use (+) and (-) signs with your search words. This will have the engine include and exclude certain words in your search.

 For example:  flowers+pots-garden

2)      Use quotation marks around your search word(“___”), the engine will then search the exact phrase you typed in

3)      Put the most important words in the front of your search

For example: Movies Western Cowboys

Internet Search Help Tips #3 and #4: Search specifications and signing up

Did you know that most search engines will not acknowledge certain words? These words are considered ‘stop words.’ “What are stop words,” you might ask? Stop words include: a, about, an, and, by, from, how, in, is, if, of, on, that, the, to, we, what, with, etc. Try using more nouns and adjectives in your search, the more words, the less results you will get.

For example: chocolate lab gets 8, 580,000 hits on Yahoo!, while chocolate Labrador retriever puppy gets 970,000 hits.

So, good luck searching, and take these Internet search tips to heart, they might actually help you get what you want!