What is a search engine, and how do I use one?
What is a keyword, and how do I choose one?
What is a stop word?
Which search engine should I use?

What is a search engine, and how do I use one?

A search engine helps you find information on the Internet. To use a search engine, you must enter a word (or words) that you expect will be in the Web pages or newsgroup messages you're looking for, then click a Search button. The search engine will look through its collection of documents for Web pages and newsgroup messages containing these keywords.

Search engines can be used to find Web sites in many languages. Your computer's ability to process accented letters and other characters will determine whether you can search for French sites, or sites in any other language.

To try out a search engine, click on the Search button at the top of any Sympatico Web page. You can enter keywords in the text boxes that appear on the Sympatico Search page, then click Search. The keywords will be sent directly to the corresponding search engine. If you want to go directly to a search engine, click its icon.

Advantages of using a search engine instead of a directory:

• They are very comprehensive
• The flexibility of indexing every word gives users complete search control

Disadvantage:

• Submitting queries to search engines can result in millions of results
What is a "keyword," and how do I choose one?

A keyword is a word that is specific to the subject of your search. For this reason, it is important to be as specific as possible when choosing one. Remember that words often have more than one meaning. For instance, "program" can refer to computer software as well as to television shows.

Using multiple and associated keywords in your search will often give you better results. If, for example, you were looking for information about cancer research done on mice, entering "research experiment mice mouse cancer" would return better results than "cancer research on mice." This is because many Web sites will use "experiment" rather than "research," and pages containing both words will probably be more relevant to your search.

Most search engines ignore the order of the keywords you enter in the text box. Individual words are treated distinctly unless you put quotation marks around them.

Once you have mastered choosing the right keywords, you can use many search features to enhance your searches.

What is a stop word?

Stop words are words that a search engine ignores because they create false hits (irrelevant search results) when included in a search query. For example, if you search for the word Internet in AltaVista Search, the search engine will respond with no documents to match the query. That's because the word Internet appears so often in the AltaVista Search database that it is ignored. Likewise, searching for the phrase to be or not to be on Infoseek will not yield any matches.

Common stop words include to, be, or, not, a, the, in, up, if, an, at, and out.

Which search engine should I use?

The search engine you choose will depend on what you want to find. If you're looking for specific information on the Web, such as about used cars for sale in Manitoba, or local art exhibits in San Diego, the large databases of AltaVista, Excite, or Infoseek would be ideal.

If you're looking specifically for newsgroups, DejaNews and the Sympatico Newsgroup Search are excellent search engines.

Askjeeves.com lets you search by typing a question in plain English. The fastest search engine we've found is Google.com

If you're looking for an old friend's e-mail address, Infoseek's "Smart Info" option would be a good place to start. If you think he or she might have posted a message to a newsgroup, DejaNews would be a good search engine to use. Just type in the person's name, then click the search button.

You might also develop a liking for some search features at certain search engines.

Intelligent searching

Some search engines, such as Excite and Infoseek, search "intelligently," in that they automatically return documents containing words related to your keywords. For instance, the keyword "mice" will turn up documents containing the word "mouse" as well as those containing "mice."

If you would like to constrain your search to francophone sites, you might want to try a francophone search engine, such as Nomade.