Search Engines
Posted by Jeff on July 6, 2009 under POGWI | 
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The wide sweeping bramble of the internet can be daunting. Say, for example, you are looking for a recipe to make a tasty chicken pot pie. Due to the huge amount of information available online, finding a chicken pot pie recipe on the internet is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or to use a more accurate simile, like finding a recipe on the internet.
Search engines are the sherpas of internet mountain. There are several search engines online. Google is one of the biggest and most popular, and a personal recommendation. Since its search page is exceptionally simple, it is the easiest and quickest to use. Yahoo, on the other hand, hits you with as much information as it can cram onto one page- everything from headlines to your local weather. If you’re after something specific, use Google. If you want to keep your finger right on the pulse of the world around you, use Yahoo.
Search engines are very easy to use. Simply type what you’re looking for into the box and hit “search.” So why dedicate a POGWI to it? Experience has shown that sometimes assuming a user understands something leads to disaster when they really don’t know what you’re talking about. Furthermore, there is a more complex side to search engines that many people don’t know about- operators.
Unfortunately, operators are not women who sit on the other side of the internet plugging different wires into different holes all day to help connect you to websites. Operators are terms that help tell the search engine what you’re looking for.
And- And is the simplest operator of them all. It is so simple that it doesn’t need to be used because search engines include it automatically. In the recipe example, searching for “chicken pot pie” (minus the quotes) actually runs a search for chicken AND pot AND pie. The search engine then pulls up pages that have all three words on them.
Quotation marks- Typing something into a search engine with quotes around it searches for that specific term. So “chicken pot pie” (minus quotes) might pull up a page that says “Becky trapped a live chicken in a pot! We let it go and all had pie” on it someplace. “Chicken pot pie” (with quotes) would only pull up pages with the three words in a row.
Or- Or is an operator when you want to pull up pages that have at least one of a few words. Searching for “chicken OR pot OR pie” (minus quotes) could pull up pages pertaining to handling livestock, marijuana, and fruit pies of the Pennsylvania Dutch. A truly useful search.
Not- Not will exclude pages from your search if they have a specified keyword on them. If you wanted to find only homemade pot pies and not frozen kinds, you might search for “chicken pot pies NOT microwavable” (again, minus the quotes.) You can combine operators and search for “”chicken pot pies” NOT microwavable” to prevent that weird story about Becky from showing up again.
Happy searching! I look forward to my pot pies!