Hint: Probably a good idea to open two windows on your browser, one with this page in it, the other with the Links page. That way you can access any of these search engines quickly.
See this page for a good example of diagrams of these often misunderstood concepts.The diagram is about 1/3 of the way down the page (use your scroller at the right).
Boolean searches are the bread and butter of Web searching.
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1: Try one search engine (AltaVista recommended here) to use
different combinations of Boolean Operators with one pair of words that
have nothing in common. You will find some interesting results. Examples:
cat, horse; underwear, Bryan Adams; corpus, christi)
Most search engines allow you to search for a "string" of characters as if it were a single word. Usually they ask you to put quotes around them.
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2: Search for your name. Try without quotes, then with quotes.
Check for the number of returned pages.
Keep it simple, stupid. Use the simplest form of the word you are looking for.
If you have many similar word forms, use the shortest one.
The asterisks is a wonderful tool that most search engines support. You can use the base form and search for all the variations by adding an asterisks to the end of the word.
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3: Search for beatn* and you will get references to the beatnick,
beatnik and beatniks, all variations of one word.
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4: Searching for specifics, like those listed above can cut
your search time drasticaly if you remember some place you have visited
before, but not how to get there. AltaVista is especially good at this.
Try searching for kevinryan.com, or http://thundershack to
get all the domain types with that name.