Admit it: Either you're envious that someone you know can always find things on the Web faster than you can or you're frustrated helping people who run searches that never find the right results. In the world of Web searches, some people just get it, and others need a few lessons on how to think the way a search engine does.

Crafting useful search strings to get exactly what you want is a skill anyone can learn. In this article, we show you how to refine your searches and get useful results—fast. We present some basic tips and walk through a number of examples, starting with one- or two-word searches and adding terms for greater accuracy. We don't get into the advanced search functions here; our goal with this article is to help you understand how to form your initial searches to get the best results. We defined a search as successful when the first six or seven results were relevant.

Start Your Engines

Search sites use text indexes, directories, or a combination of the two to locate information. Engines like Google and Northern Light index information using automated programs called spiders (or robots) to crawl the Web for new sites, as well as sites submitted by Webmasters. Search directories, such as HotBot and Yahoo!, present users with hierarchical menus, which break information down by topic and subtopic (for example, Entertainment/Movies/Genres/Comedy). Directories are best when you're looking for general or popular information. Subject headings take the guesswork out of your search.

The distinction between indexing engines and directories is blurry, because both types let you enter search terms to find results. Several sites actually license Google's engine and use it in addition to their own tools to conduct Web searches. Your best bet is to use a variety of engines and directories if you need a very thorough search, because no service can index the Web completely.

Name Your Terms

When you're entering search terms, the more specific your words and phrases are, the better. Many times, search engines will ignore words that are too common, because they slow down the search by returning too many hits. Focus your search by adding terms.

Arrange your terms from left to right (from most to least important), because some engines prioritize words in that order. Make sure you spell the terms correctly; search engines are very literal (though Google and some others may suggest alternative spellings).

Also, think about the form of the word you're entering. Searching on the word color won't necessarily retrieve pages with the words colors or coloring. AltaVista, HotBot, and Northern Light (among others) support wildcard characters, so you can enter color* to search for all words that begin with color. This procedure is also called stemming (or truncating). Some sites offer stemming in their advanced-search options; Yahoo! stems automatically.

To see how a search directory returns information, let's construct a search on Yahoo! Its search results page shows hits from its directory menus first, then information from paid sponsors (a standard search site procedure), and then general information from a third-party search.

Suppose you want to evaluate notebook computers, so you're looking for reviews and price comparisons. If you enter only the word laptop, the resulting Web links won't meet your needs, and there are too many hits for the search to be useful. The Inside Yahoo! section of the results page, however, contains links to sponsoring vendors, buyers' guides, and reviews. And you can retrieve more useful Web links by adding another term to the search. Try laptop review.

You can also widen the search by using synonymous terms in a string. Certain operators and symbols tell the search engine how to treat your search terms. AND, OR, and NOT are Boolean logic terms (named after mathematician George Boole) that you can use to link or exclude certain words from your search. In some search engines, the plus sign (+) and minus sign (-) take the places of AND and NOT. These are implied Boolean operators.

In this case, you can enter laptop OR notebook review. OR tells the search engine to retrieve pages with either word. The result is plenty of links to follow that will help you compare laptop models. Once you decide to go with Dell, for example, try the string laptop OR notebook +Dell +price. This tells the search engine to return pages with the word laptop or notebook together with the words Dell and price.

Apples and Oranges

Using distinctive words generally results in better searches, but you may have to use more than two or three. Here's an example using HotBot, which indexes words in a page and ranks results by relevance.

A search for information on McIntosh apples (the fruit) took a bit of time and experimentation. This is a perfect example of how crucial spelling is. Although apple-related Internet sites spell McIntosh with and without an a, McIntosh apples turned out relevant results immediately. But we tried Macintosh apples as well. As expected, the first dozen or so hits were links to information about computers.

By adding fruit to the query, we did retrieve one or two relevant links, but too many still referred to Apple Computer and even to apple-scented candles. A string (Macintosh apples fruit -computer -candle) that told the search engine to exclude pages with those words brought better results. Still, the best query method—short of spelling McIntosh correctly—was Macintosh apple fruit grower orchard tree -computer -candle.

HotBot assumes an AND between each term in a search string. AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google, MSN Search, and others also follow that default behavior. Gigablast assumes OR between terms, so it will find pages that include any one of your terms. You can find out how each search site behaves and which operators it recognizes by reading the help files on those sites.

More Complicated Questions

Here's a puzzler: Where (besides PCMag.com) can you find a clear explanation of differences among DVD-RAM, DVD-RAM Type II, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW? We tried a search at Teoma, a directory site that uses proprietary search technology.

Our first search was a string listing the DVD types. The first result led to a site called DVD FAQs, with frequently asked questions about DVDs. FAQ is a good term to append to any string when you're looking for general information. The problem with this search was that subsequent results were dominated by vendor sites. To focus on information sites, avoid acronyms and spell out your terms.

We decided to search on digital video FAQs, which produced six or seven relevant links. Mixing up the terms and adding a few more, we came up with digital video optical storage review, which retrieved more DVD-related sites.

Many search engines let you search for an exact phrase by putting the whole phrase in quotation marks. This is useful when you're searching for a name. If you type Charles Smith, you will get millions of links that have separate references to Charles and Smith. "Charles Smith" works better.

Here's another example: Bill and Melinda Gates recently had a baby girl, and you want to find out the baby's name. Lycos and Yahoo! are good sites to use for news searches, because they carry breaking stories from newswire services. "Bill and Melinda Gates" baby retrieves pages that are about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and babies in general, so you need to add more definitive terms. If you refine the search to "Bill and Melinda Gates" +daughter, the first five results are announcements about the new Gates baby.

Pulling Rank

Google tries to find results that contain your exact search phrase even without quotation marks, because it deems those results more likely to fit your needs. We tested this with a song lyric. We entered in 1814 we took a little trip with and without quotes. Either way, Google returned several valid links to the song "The Battle of New Orleans," by Jimmy Driftwood.

Google ranks results by looking at how many other sites have links to the result page, how many times your terms appear on the page, and so on. HotBot presents a top-ten listing of the sites chosen most frequently by people who have conducted similar searches. Other sites give each result a relevance percentage: The more relevant a site, the higher it is on the list.

Some sites let you set search preferences, such as how many results you want to see per page and whether you want objectionable content filtered out, before you start a search. If your search is on a topic that is likely to return results in a foreign language, you can narrow the field by telling the service to return links only in your language of choice (see Figure 1).