How To Find All The Information You Want Online

Online information is at the tip of your fingers. It does not matter how obscure your topic is, find it through search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Tools like DuckDuckGo for anonymous searches can help keep your privacy intact.

If you are looking for more specific data, check out sites that index webpages such as Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, FindArticles – a comprehensive citation database that provides full-text access to over 3 million articles from prestigious academic journals and other reliable sources across a wide variety of subjects, or search YouTube with keywords relevant to your topic.

Google Search Tips:

Use Boolean operators and word order to find specific results in searches. Consider how you might phrase a search query for a specialty term and then think about what keywords you need to include to ensure you get the results. For example, "definition of cancer" versus a term like "cancer treatment" or "cancer research". The first search will certainly give you more results, but it doesn't help narrow down your focus. Try adding a few words at the end of your search query to create tighter focus: for example, "definition of cancer treatment" or "cancer research". Using these terms in other words (for example, "cancer treatment") might also help refine the number of results it generates.

Google Advanced Search allows you to find specific types of content. Using it, you can find sites that are similar to what you already know, view results broken down by domain, see how recently the content was updated, block certain websites and search for pages with specific words in their titles or page text. Try using the following Advanced Search operators when looking for information: "" (quotes) to search for an exact phrase. – (minus sign) before a word to exclude results containing that word. OR between two keywords to search for both at once. "-" before a word will exclude results containing that word (example: baking -cake). mw:intitle: Keyword searching within Wikipedia pages using special commands. See the link above for all available commands.

Bing has a "How to" Center with instructions and examples on using search operators to narrow down results. Additional search tips are available for searching within other websites.

Yahoo offers tools such as Yahoo Answers where users can post questions, Yahoo People Search, Yahoo News Search, Yahoo Library Search for specific news items and more. You can also get a Yahoo email address if you want an email address that is unique from your other accounts (e.g., gmail or yahoo.). For more help on using their search engine, visit their site . Sign in to your account and click on "Help" at the top of any page to learn more about the various features. You might also try their tutorial videos to learn about features.

Tips by topic:

Science and Technology – Get directions on how to use Google for scientific research, browse the Science Advisor Community, or check out how-to guides with suggestions for using Google more effectively. Find out ways to find scholarships using Google sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and enter contests for various science prizes and competitions. Learn about educational resources at schools, universities, learning centers and sites like YouTube that offer courses and tutorials.

Health – Use tools such as Google Health Search which assists in locating health information related to specific medical topics. Also use search operators such as "site:".

Conclusion – If you are ever still not able to find quality information using Google, try Yahoo Answers, or ask a question at Quora.com which is a social knowledge market where you can post any question and get answers from people who have knowledge on the topic.

This is a guest post by Sally Parsneau . She writes articles on topics such as how to use search engines like Google for searching online information, how to find good websites using DuckDuckGo and more.

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