Pete's PC and Web Tips - Improving your searches and other search engines to use

Improving your Searches. Most people are unaware of methods you can use to narrow down your internet searching using just a few characters. These are the plus, minus and quotation marks. Quotation marks are used to force a complete phrase/sentence or whatever else is contained within the opening and closing “ to be exactly like that in the search. Capital letters are generally ignored. Using + forces the following word or phrase if used with quotation marks to be in the search criteria whereas – forces the following word/phrase to be NOT in the search. I shall demonstrate a few examples to show what I mean. One should be aware that Google is not the only search engine and that there are also others that can be used. A good alternative is Bing which you can get on http://www.bing.com Other search engines are ALTA VISTA, DOGPILE, EBAY, LYCOS, WEBCRAWLER, WIKIPEDIA and YAHOO and this is by no means a complete list as there are a lot more. In order not to lose the results of a search, one should make use of the following bullet to open the various items in new tabs or pages.