A search engine can be a powerful tool to help you answer question and gather media resources. It gives you the capability to quickly search a vast repository of information for exactly what you need.
Using a search engine can be tricky, though. A simple search will often return thousands of results; who has the time to sift through all of that?! So, in this article, we are going to review the three simple steps to using a search engine.
Select a Search Engine
There are several popular search engines out there. The one you've probably heard of the most is Google. But, a few other popular ones are Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo.
Most people use Google, so we recommend that you select Google.
Enter Search Terms
Search terms are the words that you type into a search engine. You can usually stick to keywords. Keywords are descriptive nouns. For example, if you want to learn how to bake sugar cookies, you may enter keywords like "sugar cookie recipe" rather than "how to make sugar cookies."
Something to note is that search engines treat keywords like separate entities. If you enter "sugar cookie recipe" in a search engine, it will return results that contain sugar, cookie, and "recipe;" however, the keywords will not necessarily be right next to each other.
Refine Results
Depending on what you're searching for, you may not want to view the mixed results that the search engine defaults to. You can refine the results to only display images, news, videos, and so on.
Beyond filtering the results by type, you can also perform advanced searches. These will allow you to command exactly which results you want the search engine to return. For example, by putting quotation marks around certain words or phrases, the search engine will now search for those words or phrases exactly as they are expressed within the quotation marks.
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