West Lincoln Library

Search Engines

Google - One of the most popular search sites
Ask Jeeves - Ask Jeeves any question and see if he can find the answer for you
Yahoo! - Another popular search engine. The database is well organized and the sites linked to it are of good quality.
Mamma - Great search to find hard to get images and useful information
Altavista - is amongst the largest of all the search engines
Picsearch - Another good search engine for images
Webcrawler
Lycos

Search Tips
Most Internet search engines are setup the same way, often you will have a dialog box just as this:
Using this you click in the box with the mouse so that you can see a blinking cursor, then you type in what you are looking for and hit the enter key on the keyboard or use the mouse and click on the search button.

Search Parameters
When you are searching for something, it is usually easier to search for a broad topic just to see how many results you will obtain, which can sometimes be between 2 and 20000000, thus if you get many matches it might be a good idea to change what you are looking for to a more specific phrase.

Example:
Lets say you are looking for Cumulo Nimbus cloud information, most likely there will not be a page dedicated to just one kind of cloud so your first search you look for clouds. However when you search that you get millions of results with few containing anything actually on clouds, to try and narrow you results, change your search text to cumulo nimbus clouds, the results should be more acceptable and you can find what you are looking for easier.

Additional Narrowing Techniques
Besides using extra words to narrow what you are looking for, you can also tell the computer what not to include in your result list, to do this you use negative sign ( - ) or use the word not depending on the search engine, you will have to look at the search engines own tips to find out what they use. But using this you can limit your search to what you want.

Example:
If you are looking for python information, and when you search for python you get a lot of Monthy Python information, you could type python -monthy

This would stop the results from displaying anything with the word monthy involved