Search Engine Demonstation

Let's go to a search engine to find a list of sites to help in this undertaking of purchasing a new car.

We'll use the search engine HotBot in our example

Let's simply type the word "car" and see what our results are

The search engine returned over 2 million sites.

This is quite a few sites! Unless we get really lucky, I doubt you will find a high percentage of relevant web sites.

We want more options, so we will select the "more options" button.

Notice the word "car" remains

But now we have the ability to limit the search more exactly

We can require the sites to contain certain words

And we can require the sites to exclude certain words

Since we are interested in buying the new Volkswagon beetle, let's require the word "volkswagon" and the word "beetle"
and resubmit our search

The search engine will search for sites that contain the words car, volkswagon, and beetle. But they do not have to be in any order or next to each other.

This reduced the number of sites considerably, but let's try to be even more specific.

We'll revise our search again

Since we think that the magazine "Consumer Reports" might have some information on the new bug, lets include the phrase "consumer reports" in our search.

Notice that we need to change the search criteria here from "the words" to "the phrase". This is because we want to search sites that have those two words right next to each other in that particular order.

This returns list of web sites that is much more likely to contain relevant sites.

In this particular search, the actual consumer reports site was not listed as one of the results, but the very first site in the list contains a link to the consumer reports site as well as many other relevant links regarding the purchase of a car.