Websearching: Learning to talk to Search Engine to get what you want.

 When carrying out a piece of research online, writing an article or trying to find a multimedia file to integrate in a powerpoint slide, it becomes crucial to quickly find the best material. Therefore; the need to have good web searching skills is almost an imperative. 

Traditionally, one would to go to a library and run through shelves or talk to a curator to get the needed material. In our digital world, knowing how to "talk" to Search Engines, is an art every internet user should learn about.

Among the different search tools, we can name portals, repositories, and websites. What is the relationship between all these all; they all use at some level search Engines.

Some famous Search Engines include Google, Altavista, yahoo, bing, ask. They have different approaches to querying. Even though Google seems to lead the pack, there is a large number of them. We can rate a good search engine by the number of relevant hits (results) it returns to a query (the words you are searching for )in the shortest time.

A number of tips we can be used, however; to get the best out of search Engines as discussed by the article Better Web searching. First of all, deciding on the choice of Search engine by looking at the scope of your research is important. Adding to this, using proper research options can help get the results. Some search Engines work better with the use of Bolean operators ( AND/OR, +,-). Also, knowing how to use Keywording is essential. The rule of thumb is to choose the best keyword(s), and not too many of them. The vager the keyword the less like to you'll get good results. Once the Search Engine displays the results, don't look too far from your first 20 hits as the are most likely to be your best bet. Finally, remember to wrap phrases around quotation marks; this will increase the reduce the hits you get. 

Even if the tried and test tips mentioned above are still valid, our era of multimedia quest and development is pushing towards more specialization in web searching. As this Noodletools article shows, search engines tends to be categorized in terms of needs. They are specialized according to user profile, media types and output preference. For instance, if the searcher prefers a visual presentation of the information, he or she can directly go to youtube. Similarly, when searching for image instead of going to a generalist search Engine, one can directly go to Flick or google image. With search engines the motto could be "Faster, smarter, better".