To query a search engine is very simple, all you have to do is enter a keyword or keywords into the search box and click the 'enter' or the 'search' button, as shown below.

The most important part of a search is to pick the right keywords, always pick the most relevant keyword. For example,

- If you are looking for information about Manchester United you would enter "Manchester United" as keywords rather than "football" or "soccer" or "premiership football team".

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tips

For search engines such as Google (currently the most popular search engine) it is useful to remember these points,

- The keywords entered first are the keywords deemed most important. Usually it's best to keep the query simple and to the point.

- Virtually every word you enter into a search engine is important, but some may be ignored such as 'the,' 'for,' or 'a,'. The fewer terms used the better.

- The order in which the keywords are entered also plays an important part of what search results are displayed.

- Common words such as "where" and "how" are not always recognised and may be useless.

- If the character "+" (leave a space infront of "+") is put infront of a keyword it indicates the keyword is essential. e.g., Godfather Part +1.

- The best way for searching for a phrase is to put quotation marks around the keywords. e.g., "premiership football".

- Search engines like Google are case insensitive, so using capital letters is pointless.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anatomy of Search Results

While the way search engines display their results varies from one to another, it's fair to say that they generally adhere to a similar structure. Below we will examine how Google displays it's results.

1. Is the hyperlink to the document and the title of the document

2. Is a description of the document, usually made up from the meta tag description.

3. Is the URL address of the document.

4. Is a screenshot of the document, held by Google during it's crawl of the document.

5. Provides a list of documents with a similar type of content.

6. The top result Google displays sometimes includes a list of other popular documents at that domain.