Press Room

Finding What You Want In a Web Search

I have a question about searching the Internet. It seems like every time I try to search for something, I get all kinds of other stuff come up in the search results. Why does this happen and what can I do to cut through the junk?

Julie R., Langley, BC

Hi Julie,

The end result of a search is entirely dependent on how specific you are when you search. It's not like standing in your kitchen and asking a child to do you a favour, go and get the “thing-a-ma-bob” off the “whatcha-ma-call-it”, and the child knows by the tone of your voice, exactly what you mean.

Search engines are very specific. In order to get one to pick more useful information you need to tell it to “go and get the yellow-striped pencil that has its eraser chewed off near the top that sits perpendicular the bottom left corner of my desk and bring it to me.” It can get even more specific than that but I think you get the point.

Here are some tips to help your searches.
. Try to be as specific as you can be.
. Use “ ” [quotation marks] around phrases like “Canadian Child Care Federation”
. Attach a + [plus sign] to a word. This requires that the word be found in all of the results (child versus child+care)
- Attach a - [minus sign] in front of a word requires that the word not be found in the results. For instance, if you are looking for child care sites in Canada and want to eliminate search results of ones in the United States, you would type in “child+care+Canada - US” [make sure that there is a space between Canada and the minus sign in front of the “US”]
. Use t: [letter 't', colon]. This restricts searches to document titles only
. Use u: [letter 'u', colon]. This restricts searches to a URL (uniform resource locator) - the address of a website on the World Wide Web.

Even with these hints, you might find it difficult because the Internet is an ever changing medium. Documents that were there yesterday might be gone tomorrow. Persistence is the key!

If you're still having a hard time with searches, write to me at awilson@cccf-fcsge.ca and I'll do my best to help you out.

Best of luck! Ali

Alison Wilson is administrative assistant at the CCCF.