How To Use Web Search Engines How to get the most from search engines like AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, Webcrawler, Lycos, HotBot, and the Yahoo Directory. This page should help you search more effectively even if you didn't read everything else on this site. Use your intelligence.
Search engines are fast, but dumb.
A search engine's ability to understand what you want is very limited. It will obediently look for occurrences of your keywords all over the Web, but it doesn't understand what your keywords mean or why they're important to you. To a search engine, a keyword is just a string of characters. Therefore, you must supply the brains. The search engine will supply the raw computing power.