Introduction to the Internet - Page 4

Tip One

With most search engines, placing quotes around a phrase causes the search engine to list only those sites containing that phrase. Leaving the quotes off would cause the search engine to any site containing the words you specified, even if the words do not appear next to each other. For example, go to Google and (in quotes) type:

Press Enter, and have a look at the results.

Look at the top right of the screen. Google lists about how many results were found. Copy that number and PASTE in your Microsoft Word document under the heading Exercise 4.

Now do the same search, but WITHOUT the quotes:

Have a look: Without any quotes, your list of URLs is long, and cluttered with pages which merely mention the word "fish" and the word "food," but they may not necessarily be together. You'll see diet pages, Italian and Japanese cooking pages, and any other pages that contain a liberal sprinkling of the words you seek. These pages have nothing to do with fish food!

For example, the one page I saw listed when I searched for fish food instead of "fish food" was the 'FDA Food and Safety Information page.' This page appeared because it contained the word "food" (inside this sentence: 'Vice President announces food safety initiative') at the top of the page, and the word "fish" appeared further down the page (inside the phrase 'regulatory fish encyclopedia').

The page contained the words I asked for. The search engine did its job. Unfortunately, the words do not appear next to one another. If I had only placed quotes around the words, the search engine would have known that I was only interested in pages which display the words exactly as I typed them.

To summarize, surround two or more words with quotes if you want to force the search engine to search for a phrase instead of a group of independent words.

Look at the top right of the screen. Google lists about how many results were found when you searched for fish food without quotes. Copy that number and PASTE in your Microsoft Word document under the heading Exercise 5.