1. Consider what you search.
That sounds so ridiculous, but some people begin to search and don't find, because they did not think before they begun to search. If you search, you want to find something. And this something is very special, you need to find it. May it be subject-related information, or URL's that cover a certain topic, or persons, or whatever, the first step is to think. I always ask myself a question: What do I really search? And most of the times, I make a note. I try to specify the object of my search, describe it, try to figure out how I would describe it in one or two words, under which heading I would put it.
And I try to be as specific as possible. eg. green beans, if I wanna look for green beans. It's not wrong to look for beans, but if I know I need green beans, why look at all the other beans? It economizes time, if you specify the object of your search as good as possible.
2. Learn about search engines
You see, I always read the help files and/or the FAQ's of the searchengines before I use them. Why? Because I want to use that engine as efficient as possible. This is not very important if you use a very specialized search engine, eg. an engine that searches only law-related texts.
But especially the big general search engines have a lot to offer! I try to benefit from their efforts, to make searching as easy as possible, and as fast and accurate as possible. I nearly never used Altavista without using the refine possibility, and I try whenever possible to use the Boolean thingis. I call these thingis, but to use them results in very effective searches!
All this and much more can be found in the help- and FAQ-pages of the searchengines.
3. Using the appropriate engine
I do not recommend to search always with the same engine. It really depends what you search to decide where you search. For instance: If I search for a recipe, I never search in a general search engine, then I use a specialized recipe search. (to find in my special search page). And if I want to find Software, why check a fulltextsearch? So, maybe it makes sense, just to browse once through the Search Center to look, what there is - you will be surprised how many specialized search engines exist!
When to use the big engines? If you do not know a special search engine, that covers the heading of the object of your search.
When to use metasearch or multisearch? I don't use these a lot. You cannot have benefits for searching one special object. I recommend them if you wanna have one searchform to offer on your page, and if you want to collect a big amount of results for a certain topic in the shortes possible time. But this is not normal. Your normal search will be covered more than sufficiently by one of the big engines.
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