What is a search engine?
You will not always know the web address of the web site you wish to visit in these cases you can use one of the many Internet ‘search engines’ to locate the information you require.
A search engine is a web page that allows you to enter a search term then displays a list of sites relevant to your term.
What are the common search engines?
Some search engines will automatically redirect you to the local version based on your location. If you know the address of the web site you wish to visit type it into the address bar NOT the search box.
How do I search?
- Type the address of the search engine (examples above) into the address bar and press <Enter>.
- Enter your search term.
- Press <Enter> or click the search button on the web page.
A list of sites containing your search term will be displayed. - Click on one of the links to go to the web page.
The example below illustrates the results of typing “Key Community Supports” into Google.
Are search terms case sensitive?
Most search engines are not case sensitive; Searching for ‘Key’ will provide the same results as searching for ‘KEY’, ‘KeY’ or ‘key’.
How do I limit a search?
If you end up with too many results add words to limit the search.
Use the minus sign (-) to show only pages which do not contain the word. Example Key community supports - Glasgow. This will show pages with have “key community supports” in them, any pages with the word Glasgow will be removed from the results.
How do I expand a search?
If you get too few results try changing your search words or remove some if you have many.
Search engines allow the use of the tilde symbol (~) to search for synonyms of that word. For example, search for ~house will return results of sites containing ‘house, home, property, housing etc’.
Can I search a web site?
If a web site does not have its own search function it may still be possible to search it using a search engine.
- Go to your preferred search engine page.
- Type your search term.
- Press <Space>.
- Type site:<web address to be searched>.
- Press <Return>.
The graphic below shows the result of searching for “jobs” on the Key website.
Search term - jobs site:www.keyhousing.org
