How to Use a Search Engine

Searching for something on the internet is a skill that takes practice! The better your search terms are, the better your results will be.

Choosing Your Keywords

When you use a search engine, you should choose your words carefully. These are called keywords.

If you’re looking for information on how to care for a pet hamster, don’t just search for “animals” or “hamsters.” Those are too broad and will give you millions of results that might not help. Instead, try searching for “how to take care of a pet hamster.”

Tip: Think of keywords like labels on a box. The more accurate the label, the easier it is to know what’s inside!

Tips for Better Searching

• Be Specific: Instead of searching for “games,” try something like “free online math games for kids.”
• Use Quotes: If you’re looking for a specific phrase or a line from a book, put it in quotes, like "to be or not to be." This tells the search engine to look for those exact words in that exact order. It’s also great for finding song lyrics, like "we all live in a yellow submarine".
• Avoid Extra Words: Search engines usually ignore words like “the,” “and,” and “a,” so you can leave them out if you want! Searching for “weather Paris” works just as well as “what is the weather in Paris.”

Advanced Search Tricks

Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can use these special tricks to find exactly what you need even faster:

• Exclude Words with a Minus Sign (-): Sometimes a word has two meanings. If you want to search for “jaguar” (the animal) but keep getting results about the car, try searching for jaguar -car. This tells the search engine to show results for jaguar but not the car.
• Search Within a Website (site:): If you know the information is on a specific website, you can tell the search engine to only look there. Type site: followed by the website address and then your keywords.
  • Example: site:nasa.gov mars rover will only show results from NASA’s website.
• Find Specific File Types (filetype:): If you are looking for a specific type of file, like a PDF to print out, you can use filetype:.
  • Example: dinosaur coloring page filetype:pdf will help you find a file that is ready to download and print.

Reading the Results

When you get your list of results, don’t just click the first one! Look at the snippet (the short description) under the title. It will tell you a little bit about what’s on the page so you can decide if it’s what you’re looking for. Often, the keywords you searched for will be in bold in the snippet.

Did you know?

• Image Search: You can search for pictures and videos just as easily as text! Just click the “Images” or “Videos” tab at the top of the search results page.
• Calculations and Conversions: You can use a search engine like a calculator or a translator! Try typing in 2 + 2 or 10 kilograms in pounds.
• Voice Search: Many devices now let you search just by speaking! You can ask your computer or phone a question, and it will search for the answer for you.

Check Your Knowledge

1. What are “keywords” and why should you choose them carefully?
2. What does putting a phrase in “quotes” do when you search?
3. If you want to find information about “bats” but you don’t want to see anything about “baseball”, what should you type?
4. How do you tell a search engine to only look for information on one specific website (like wikipedia.org)?
5. What is a “snippet” and how does it help you choose which website to visit?