Tips for Searching the Internet

1. Pay attention to word order

Type in your most important concepts first. Many search engines take word order approach with their results.

2. Go from specific to general

Be as specific as you can when starting your search; you can always become more general later if you need to.

3. Revise your strategy

If you find that the first 10 - 30 results do not seem to be very relevant, try altering your search strategy.

4. Search phrases with quotation marks

This forces the search engine to look for a string of characters EXACTLY as you key them in (this means spelling and word order count!)

• Example: go to Google and type in "University of Nebraska Medical Center Graduate" surrounded by quotation marks. Now do the same search without the quotation marks. Compare the difference in number of records retreived and the accuracy of results.

5. Include essential words and exclude terms you do not want

By using a "+" sign and a "-" sign, you can include or exclude terms (see "AND" and "NOT" above).

• Example: use Google.com and type in "+terrier -cairn" (without the quotation marks). These results should give you web pages that are about terriers, but not about cairn terriers.

6. Guess a location.

The address or URL (uniform resource locator) of a web site is often guessable. URL's often follow a standard form. For example companies will list their URL as "http://www.companynamehere.com." Pfizer uses this approach with their URL as http://www.pfizer.com/ Notice the last three letters "com". This is called the domain portion of the URL. You will find the domain to be representative of the type of organization you are accessing on the Web. The major domains you will most likely encounter include the following:

• com for commerical organizations (http://www.gap.com)
• edu represents educational organizations (http://www.unmc.edu/)
• gov denotes government agencies (http://www.fda.gov/)
• mil represents the military (http://www.navy.mil)
• org for other organizations such as hospitals (http://www.aha.org)

7. Read the search tips provided by the search engines.

You will learn better techniques on how to refine your searches and improve your results if you invest some time in learning how to search your favorite search engines.

8. Talk to a Librarian!!

Reference Librarians are available during normal business hours at the McGoogan Library of Medicine to help you. Call (402) 559-6221 for their assistance or e-mail Ask Us.