Web search engines like Bing continually search the Internet for new documents and add them to their database. The Web is a very large information resource consisting of millions and millions of documents, but many of these documents contain information which you do not want e.g.
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material written by 10 years olds (not much detail)
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material written by people who do not know what they are talking about (inaccurate)
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advertisements (not wanted)
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personal home pages (boring!)
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academic research papers (may be too detailed and obscure)
Basic tips for searching
Tip 1 -
To exclude words, use a -
if you do not want the word in the document, add a -
e.g. This is the way that you would write the search keywords in the search box on the search engine website: (notice the space after each word)
| Mandela marriage Graca -Winnie |
Tip 2 - If there is more than one word in the phrase, use "quotation marks"
This applies if the words for which you are searching are
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a quotation from a document (e.g. "I have a dream")
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a proper name of a person, song or place etc (e.g. "Trott Moloto" and "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika")
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several words, but one idea (e.g. "culture of learning", or "Bill of Rights")
e.g. (sub-tip: use capitals if the words are proper names)
| "Nelson Mandela""Graca Machel" -"Winnie Mandela" |
| "outcomes-based education""South Africa" -Australia -"United States" |
For more tips on a greater variety of search engines, we recommend the Findspot search site.