Searching for information on the Internet can be frustrating unless you know THE technique.
My current favorite search engine is GOOGLE. Type www.google.com in the browser address space and press the enter key.
While selecting good keywords is important, the technique of using multiple windows makes it easy to reap the bountiful harvest produced from those good keywords.
Say that you desired to find the text of the Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. You may be sure that you will get LOTS of hits that won't be what you desire. So enter 'Gettysburg Address' without the quote marks in appropriate space and press the search button. I got approximately 70,000 hits.
Scan down through the list (using the slider on the right side of the screen) until you find one that looks promising. With the mouse on the underlined link of the promising answer page, press the RIGHT mouse button. This brings up a selection menu. Choose the 'Open in a New Window' option. This opens a new window and loads the new window with the link contents that you clicked upon. You now have two windows running your browser. Look at the bottom of your screen and you can see buttons for those two windows. The left one will have your original search engine inquiry and the right one is loading the promising answer web page. You 'activate' whichever one you want by clicking upon the appropriate button at the bottom of the screen. Now, if you have a slow internet connection, click on your original inquiry, the left browser window button(at the bottom), and select another promising answer page. Right click on it and open it in a new window also. You now have three browser windows open. Check to see if the first promising answer page has loaded (by clicking the middle button on the bottom of the screen). Let's assume that it has and was not our desired answer. Close that browser window by clicking the X in the upper right corner and click on the leftmost browser button on the bottom to go back to your original inquiry. Select another promising answer answer page and click on it with the right mouse button to open it in a new window. etc. etc.
Advantages:
You never lose your original inquiry. If it is a good inquiry fine, if it needs additional 'tuning' it is still there to fix and rerun.
You don't wait for pages to load. You use the time pages are loading to (yourself) search for more potential pages (on the search engine results page) or eliminate non-fruitful pages retrieved.
Keywords:
Choosing good keywords helps TREMENDOUSLY. In the above example, I first tried 'Gettysburg Address text' and couldn't use it for my example because the first result was the full address text! While the usual problem is too many answers and the problem is weeding out the non-relevant ones, sometimes, it is necessary to 'open up' a query to get more result pages. Then read through these pages searching for better keywords than originally came to mind or with a different slant than you had originally perceived. The trick here is to recognize them and their potential when you see them! I likewise will sometimes find more restrictive keywords on partially relevant pages.
Page created by: mike@mikebaker.com