USING PHRASES TO SEARCH

Computers are not very good at understanding human speech, especially when they are given only a few words to work with! As a result, when you type in two words such as "Minnesota Gophers", it has a hard time deciding whether you meant the two words to be together, or whether they can be separated. Most search engines will look for both, with the result that you will find websites on those cute, furry little critters called "gophers", as well as any of the many sport teams from the University of Minnesota!

There is a way around this problem, though!   You can tell the search engine that you only want web sites where the words you typed in appear side-by-side and in exactly the order that you typed them. This is called "phrase searching". Most search engines will do a phrase search if you put the words between quote marks, like this:

Phrase searching is very particularly helpful when your searches are finding too many sites that have nothing to do with the topic that you are researching.