To narrow or broaden your search, try these tips.

I usually use all lowercase letters when I search for words on search engines.  If you use the lowercase word reformation, you will pull up pages that have variations of the word such as reformation, Reformation, or REFORMATION. Using lower case yields the most matched documents.

However, if you know that the word you're searching for is usually capitalized, then type it as you would expect it to be capitalized to narrow your search.  

For instance, when people write about the Protestant Reformation in the 1500's they usually capitalize the word Reformation, because it refers to a distinct period of history.  If you do a search on Alta Vista using Reformation instead of reformation, you'll get a smaller number of documents, and probably those more closely related to our topic.  You can try it now at altavista.com.  Search for the word Reformation.  

On the day I searched for this word, it returned about 70,000 pages, about 25,000 pages less than before, and those in the top 10-20 matches had changed as well, cutting out documents that talked about some "corporate reformation program" or others unrelated to the Protestant Reformation.

Now here's a tip that will save you hours of searching and will be well worth the price of this course (OK, it's a free course, but it'll still save you time).  You can significantly narrow your search results if you know an exact phrase that might appear in a document.  For instance, try doing a search for web pages about me.  Go to altavista.com and do a search on eric elder.  On the day I did this search, Alta Vista found about 4,000 web pages that matched.  That's a lot of people writing about Eric Elder!

Actually, very few of those are about Eric Elder.  Alta Vista is simply saying that about 4,000 pages contain some combination of the words eric and elder.  To narrow your search greatly, put the phrase in quotes like this:  "eric elder".  Your search will now look for the exact phrase, "eric elder", just as it was typed with only one space between the words.  Now try this search for "eric elder" and see the results.

Ahhh, now it says there are only about 100 pages with the name Eric Elder on them!  That's more like it.  And half of those aren't me, but about other Eric Elder's around the world, none of whom I knew existed until I did this search on the Internet!  The things you can find out when you do research online.  So to narrow your search, remember to use quotation marks around phrases.

Continue on for some more search engine tips.

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