Education online: the basics

Each of the search engines and directories, like Yahoo, Alta Vista, Looksmart and Ask Jeeves, provide a guide on how to conduct a search. Sometimes this is listed as ‘help’ and it’s worth exploring because you will dramatically improve your search results.

As an example, consider a search for a 15-year-old GCSE student writing a report for her business studies course. A search for ‘business studies’ would find almost 35,000 pages. But by using the plus sign and adding extra phrases, you can limit your search.

In this example ‘business studies + GCSE + report writing’ produces a list of only 60 pages. Tips like this can make searching much more manageable.