Many students should not begin their searches in search engines. One colleague pointed out that if you start with Yahoo, you can retry your search in other major search engines without having to retype search criteria all the way at the bottom of the Yahoo page. My favorite search engine. If I chose to wear a sandwich board at work, it would not say Eat at Joe's. HotBot has my vote as the one to use with students.
Syntax is the language, the symbols, the strategies employed by a search engine.
Person-searching automatically uses a proximity feature searching first and last names close together in either order. Getting to the good stuff. Since my last article on the subject, two major metasearch engines have appeared. Users can customize their searches so that the results of their favorite search engines appear first. It organizes the results by relevance into a uniform format.