How to research using the web

Whether you are looking for answers, want to find a person or you are searching the web for a certain file, learning how to research effectively on the web through Google and other search engines increases your productivity. You can become a web detective by following the steps mentioned in this article.

Use Google search engine

Google.com may be the best website on the net. This is because almost all of your searches start from this search engine. In a sense, it is the mother of all sites. You can use the web without Google but it certainly does a very good job of automating the search results. Its family of products simply grow to serve web users even better. How to do a basic search Simply enter your keywords into the search bar and press Enter. The results returned to you are 'everything' by default. You can refine your results by clicking on the options on the left bar: images, videos, news, shopping, books, places, blogs, discussions, recipes and patents. Here are more filters on the left bar: Sites with images, related searches, timeline, dictionary, reading level, nearby, custom location and translated foreign pages. Try clicking on 'timeline' and see what comes up. You can further refine the timeline from as early as the past hour to as late as last year. You can also feel free to enter a custom date range. How to do an advanced search Find 'Advanced search' under the search bar and click on it. Here, you can advance your search by the keywords, reading level, results per page (ten is the default), language, file type and domain name. You can also filter by the date, usage rights, region, numeric range and search safety. You can find similar pages and pages that link to the specific page you are searching for.

Other search engines

You can use search engines which are dedicated to specific purposes. There are search engines specifically for PDF files, MP3s, blogs, books, e-mails, forums, answers, jobs, videos, news, real estate, educational institutions, shopping, source codes, etc. Search engines can, of course, be found in other languages where the results returned will be in those languages too, for the most part. Do you know that there are visual search engines? Instead of presenting the results in a list format, you may find results in a (mind) map or cloud form, for instance.