Tips for searching for free stuffs on the Net

Searching the net for the first time by typing a word into a search engine and coming with a response of 63, 173 listings found is like finding a needle in a football field. Clearly it becomes mandatory that you have a strategy for narrowing your search.

1. Start with general search tools:
Begin with general search tool such as AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos and Yahoo. Later, if you haven’t been able to narrow your search, go to specific search tools.

2. Choose your search term well and watch your spelling:
Use the most precise word possible. If you’re looking for information about novelist (Author of things fall apart), you may need to use several similar words to explore the topic you’re investigating.

3. Use phrase with quotation mark rather than separate words:
If you type football kit, you could get result of
*Everything to do with football and
* Everything to do with kit on the other hand.
Better to put your phrase in quotation mark “football kit” to narrow your search.

Put unique word first in a phrase:
Better to have “Chinua Achebe Novels” rather than “Novels Chinua Achebe”

4. Use operators – AND, OR, NOT, and + and – signs:
Most search sites use symbols called Booleen Operators to make searching more precise. To illustrate how they are used, suppose you’re looking for information about “Drug use by Marion Jones” AND connects two or more search words and means that all of them must appear in the search result. E.g. Marion Jones and Drugs.
· OR connects two or more search words and indicates that any of the two may appear in the result.
· NOT when inserted before a word, excludes that word from the results.
· + (Plus sign) like AND, precedes a word that may be included in the search results. E.g. + EFCC + IBORI
· - (minus sign) like NOT, excludes the word that follows it. E.g. Nations Cup – Nigeria

· Read the Help or Search tips section
All search sites provides a help section and tips. This could save you a lot of time.

· Try an alternate general site or specific search site:
If you’re looking for very specific information, a general type of search site such as Yahoo or Google may not be best way to go. Instead, you should turn to a specific search site.

NB: Some search engines are “case sensitive”. Changing the keywords from lower to upper case may bring out a different set of search results.

Each of these search engines has its own unique feature and constant usage will help the user know the particular search engine that particularly suites him or her. With the above knowledge, lets proceed to the real business proper.