Welcome to another tutorial. Hope you'll enjoy this one too. 2 tasks included at the end.
Searching the Web could be broken down into the following as to make the most effective use of the Internet and the Web:

• search
• sort and store
• evaluate what you've found

To carry out a search, you use a "search engine". This is a tool/program that asks you to type a word or words, or choose from a menu; the program will then carry out a search which works in a similar way to the "Find" function in word processors. Search engines can be found at well-known portals like Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot, and Yahoo!, or on a site specially designed for the search engine only (like Google), but there are many others, and new ones appear regularly. There are also meta- or mega-search engines (like 1Blink), which search the search engines and will bring you the best few results from many search engines and portals. We'll later see and you'll evaluate how useful, or not, they are, and you'll most probably stick in the future to the ones that match your liking.

Typing in a word will search for pages containing that word or words you have asked for. The pages that the engine finds are known as "hits", so if it finds 20 pages, it might report those 20 hits and it will put the closest match on the top of the results page so that they're viewed first. The hits will have an address (URL), and very often a short description. You might wish to store the results by saving the results page on your computer, or you may want to visit the first 2-3 closest hits to evaluate what you've found.

Let's see now how to improve our searching skills, techniques and strategies, because I've very often seen people visit one site from the search results page, leave the search engine page; then after lots of surfing they want to go back to their results page again, and what do you think they do? They start frantically hitting the Back button of their browser. This whole thing is inefficient!

This is what I do.
First, I open 2-3 search engine sites in different browsers and get lots of hits I see if any same hits appear on top as best/closest matches. Then, I open different sites (hits) in new windows and while I read one, the others load. A quick look is generally enough to evaluate and see if it is what I need. If the site is useful, I bookmark, print or save it. If I don't need it, I close it and open another site from the results since I haven't left the search engine but have opened results in new windows.

How to do this? With your mouse on the link (URL), right-click and choose from the menu "Open in New Window/Tab". Give it a try some time and see how much more efficient you'll be.

If this improves your efficiency, it won't improve your searching skills, so here are some strategies that will:

Decide if the information is likely to be available on the Web:

Although the web contains a vast amount of information, simply the information you want might not be on the Web yet.

Decide if the information is available more conveniently somewhere else:

What you need may be available on the Web, but it might be quicker and easier to ask someone who already knows the answer, or to consult a book, rather than search on the Web.

Decide which search engine to use:

There are many and different search engines, and they give different results, so try different search engines (at least 2) at the same time; and try others you haven't used before.

Here we get to the real searching techniques. Look at the table below.

Similarly, you can search for author: "some name"; and instead of [+]plus/[-]minus you can use AND, OR or NOT.

Use the wildcards [*], but mind that not all search engines accept them in the beginning of the words, so you'd better see their instructions.

Use lowercase as far as possible. Capital letters in a search will force an exact case match on the entire word. This means that if you type Research, you'll get Web pages that contain the word Research, but NOT those that contain research or RESEARCH.

And, of course, you can combine all these to your liking as to focus your search. Limiting the search, though, may exclude some very useful sites. But you'll see for yourself as you gain more experience.

You'll probably want to give it a try, so go ahead! And see what you get.

There's one more useful way of carrying out a search - directories or categories. Many search engines and portals now offer ready-indexed pages, ordered in classified directories. Sometimes your search is better targeted in these directories. And, of course, getting to the category you want but not finding many useful hits, may lead you to do a search within the category, and a further (more focused) search within the results.

Well, this has been much too much new information, so let's put it all into practice. The tasks as promised.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Come back soon for more.