The first step in a successful search is to decide exactly what you’re looking for. Ask yourself how likely it is that the information you’re looking for is even on the Web. The most popular topics of research - aside from sex in its various manifestations - tend to be sports, entertainment, news, companies and their products, and computers and telecommunications.

If your looking for something published more than a year or two ago, you’re better off starting with a commercial database service such as Dialog Information Retrieval Service, Lexis-Nexis, the Dow Jones/News Retrieval service.

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If you have a specific goal, like finding travel tips about New Zealand or seeing a photograph of the gemstone tourmaline, then fire up a search engine, enter your search terms, and scour the Web. Give it a well-targeted query, and a search engine can provide a hyperlinked list of sites that might contain your desired information.

If you don’t quite know where to start, or you want to learn more about a broad category - say, gemstones - you’ll fare better with a subject catalog or virtual library.

A third approach is look for "guru sites". These are the web sites devoted to their creator’s maniacal interest in some topic.

The dozens of Web-based newsstands can be useful too. These let you search online versions of publications ranging from "People Weekly" magazine to "The New York Times" and "The Wall Street Journal". Note, that you are covering material that has been published in newspapers and magazines, rather than on the Web.

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1. Check your spelling.
   
2. Use the correct case. To find uppercase instances of a word, capitalize the word in your search. To find both uppercase and lowercase instances of a term, use lowercase.
   
3. Use a comma to separate capitalized names or phrases.
   For example: Bill Clinton, Yeltsin.
   
4. Try synonyms and variations.
   For example: CDROM, CD-ROM.
   
5. You can also use the qualifiers or and not to refine your search. As well as the minus sign.
   For example: -film excludes sites containing the word film.
   
6. Avoid using special characters or punctuation in your searches.
   
7. Sometimes the word you are looking for is commonly associated with another meaning.
   For example: Python can be a snake as well as a British comedy group.
   
8. Try using another search engine.

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Regardless of which search engine you’re using, some basic research principles apply. Take advantage of advanced search features that let you hone in on your subject. Such features are often a click away from the main page, under a button or link marked Advanced Search Options or Power Search.

In general, the more specific your search terms, the better. If you know you’re interested in tourmalines, adding "gemstones" to a simple search will, in most cases, only dilute your results. If you’re looking for tourmalines and get too many references to a resort called Tourmaline Bay, use a search engine that lets you use the Boolean operator NOT to eliminate the irrelevant stuff. In this case your search terms would be something like "tourmaline NOT bay".

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Finally, find the answers to the following questions by checking a search engine’s documentation. You should be aware of all these factors, but their importance may vary (sometimes it’s good that an engine doesn’t search a whole document or the whole Web).

• Does the engine cover the entire Web, or just selected sites?
  Some offer specialized subsets of, for example, the Web sites they consider the best.
  
• Does it search more than the Web?
  It can be a plus if an engine covers Usenet newsgroups and commercial databases as well.
  
• How much of any given document or Web site does the engine pick up?
  Some cover just the main page, ignoring anything that might appear in a succeeding page or linked document. Some let you confine your search to the first paragraph of text, the title, or some other segment of each document.
  
• Can you do Boolean searches, in which you can use operators such as AND and OR to look for multiple terms in specific relationships?
  
• Can you specify that your terms must appear close to each other, not just anywhere in the same document?
  
• Can you search for entire phrases - "freedom of choice" or "peanut butter and jelly", for example - exactly as you write them, rather than just a string of words without a particular order?
  
• Can you indicate that a word must appear, as opposed to being optional?

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