Keyword Searching

Most search tools are based on keyword searching. For example, if trying to decide on what type of dog to get, you could use your favorite search engine to find pages that contain the word dog. Granted, using this keyword would return thousands of matches. As an example, the Infoseek search engine (http://www.infoseek.com) returned 376,266 matches. To help narrow your search, choose keywords that are specific. Changing our keyword to spaniel lowers the number of matches considerably (Infoseek - 5,483).

Adding words to your query will increase the number of matches because most search tools look for pages that match any of the words you enter. Searching for dog spaniel will find any pages that contain the word dog, any pages that contain the word spaniel, and any pages that contain BOTH dog and spaniel.

Another strategy when using keyword searching is to capitalize the names of people and places. When you search for a capitalized word, the search engine will only find those pages that have the word capitalized. For example, our search on Spaniel returned 2,981 matches in Infoseek. Searching on all lowercase will find matches that are either capitalized or not.