Search tips

Updated - Friday 05 November 2004

For using Google

Google guide - good free guide on Google, http://www.googleguide.com/print.html

For using Google, Yahoo! and Teoma

phrase searching is the most simple way to provide more accurate results.
Example: “sustainable livelihoods”
be aware that search engines search on ‘all of the terms’
adding more terms should provide fewer results
start with very specific search queries and then get more and more general
use – to exclude terms, i.e. school sanitation –unicef
only a few pages of the same website are shown (due to clustering of the results).
Use ‘more results from this website’ or ‘show omitted results’ to get the additional results
use advanced search for more specific options (specific formats, specific domain searches, language documents or date of publications)
refine your search with the option ‘search within results’

For using portals / subject gateways

To search through all the pages of a specific water portal you can use the search option of the portal itself. If this doesn’t help much, you may want to try the domain / site search feature of Google, Yahoo! or Teoma. For example for a search on wastewater: type in the search box: site:www.irc.nl wastewater

Portals and subject gateways will be a good starting point (8) for:

topics that are easily classified, i.e. looking for a government water department web site vs. looking for an article on sector wide approaches
a topic that falls into a thematic area which is covered by a subject directory, i.e. ecological sanitation is a topic in the Sanitation Connection Portal (http://www.sanicon.net/index.php3)
new information on a specific topic.

For using databases

Databases have the following advantages compared to search engines.