Web searching is first and foremost a matter of words. But what words? And what strategies can we apply to get the most out of those words? There are syntactical tools we can use at search engines to narrow a search to the most relevant pages. Knowing how to specify the words and their relationship to each other is key to making your web searching more effective.

Unfortunately, every search engine uses slightly different rules. To be sure of getting the best results possible from a search engine, it's important to learn the rules of that search engine. The WSG comparison charts are cheat sheets to the rules and the WSG Guides show how these rules can be used to construct search queries.

Spend some time learning the search techniques presented in this section. Also, experiment with your own searches in a subject you know well in order to see how these techiniques and syntax can improve search results and save you time.

Where to Next?

Start with natural language.