You may have experienced mixed results with search engines so far. Sharing and discussing your successes and failures with colleagues on your staff or with your group is one way of improving your search skills.

There are several ways of improving your search results:

• practise a lot;
• Discuss your methods and results with someone;
• Use good search engines (AskJeeves and Yahoo are regarded as good search engines in their categories);
• Use the correct search engine for your specific needs;
• Use keyword search engines (see recommended reading below).

Google is one of the best keyword search engines. It is also the easiest one to use. The most important skill you need to use Google is to be able to identify good keywords.

We recommend that you read about How to identify keywords.

You might also like to read an alternative approach to identifying keywords in Before you search.

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Once you have finished reading through the materials above, move on to Activity 5 - Using a keyword search.