One of the biggest problems users face on the web today is finding exactly what they are looking for. From new users, to advanced technophiles, hunting down that little bit of information among billions of bytes can be a daunting task. How can we learn how to pinpoint what we really want, while discarding the junk, and better managing our time?

First thing we need to know is where to look. There are hundreds of search engines available, but only a select few are really worth using. For quick, to the point searches, I find AltaVista and Google to be the best. Both have very large databases, and deliver good results, while Google keeps advertising to a bare minimum, and delivers what you are looking for at an accelerated rate.

If you are looking for a certain type of web site (for instance, Mac News sites or Learning how to throw darts) then a directory should be your first stop. The two main players here are Yahoo and the Open Directory Project. Yahoo is absolutely huge, and is one of the most coveted directories to become a part of. However, their reviewers seem to be really strict, causing them to not have everything you might need. The Open Directory Project is a non-profit organization, devoted to organizing the Web. If I'm looking for a group of sites, I will look to the ODP. Unless of course I'm looking for Macintosh related stuff, at which time I will go to Google's All Mac section.

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If you really haven't a clue what you are looking for, you can try a Meta search engine. Some of the better ones in this category are DogPile and Search37. Both of these places take multiple search engines, and queue them at the same time, bringing you the results in a nice clean format. Of the two, I feel DogPile is easier to use, and brings more relevant resultss. However, these places take longer to load, and sometimes can be more of a burden than a blessing.

Now that we know where to take our search, we need to learn how to make our searches count. The first thing to learn is how to use Boolean characters. By adding +, -, and quotations (plus AND/OR statements) with your searches, you can narrow down your search unbelievably. Most search engines will allow you to place +/- minus symbols in front of words to make sure certain words are a part of the results, or are omitted. By using quotation marks around your search term, the search engine will look for the exact phrase, just how you typed it. Helpful for looking for something you knew you read, but can't remember where it came from.

The AND/OR statements are used in nearly the same way. If you place AND between two words in your search phrase, the engine will look for both of those words in the pages. Most search engines are designed to do this by default, do it is normally unnecessary. The OR statements will broaden your search by looking for pages with one word or another word. This could be helpful if you are looking for something that goes by two names, but be careful. Using this statement in the wrong place will cause overly large results to be returned, making it harder to find what you were looking for.

Also, when thinking about what you want to search for, think of how you can be specific, without loosing important pages. The more specific you can be, the better your chances of finding just what you want. But if you are too specific, you may loose some of the sites that would have given you great information. This isn't just something that comes to you. After you search for dozens of things on the Internet, phrasing your searches correctly will become easier and easier. A hard task to master, but essential for great searches.

Ok, now we know how to narrow or broaden our searches, but how do we decipher the results the search engine gives us? Most search engines will order the results in terms of relevance, or how many times your words were found in the documents. Because of this, 95% of the time, what you are looking for will be in the first 20-30 pages. Looking past that will just give you either more of the same, or totally unrelated sites.

Speaking of totally unrelated sites, we have all heard the stories of users searching for something very specific, and somehow getting pornography or hate sites in their results. This is one of the little annoyances with unregulated text searches. About the only thing you can do is ignore these sites, and move on. If you can see by the description the searcg engine gives you that it isn't what you were looking for, don't waste your time clicking on the link.

Well, that's about the jist of online searches. Know what you are looking for, use Boolean to narrow your searches, be specific, don't go too far into the results, and watch out for unrelated sites. By using these techniques, you will be able to achieve better search results, as a faster pace. Soon, you will be surfing the web like never before.