The key to conducting a good search is to choose appropriate keywords as search terms. Try to choose search terms that will narrow your search enough to return the results you want. At the same time, avoid making your search so specific that you exclude valuable results or do not get any results at all. Considering using the following tips to develop good search terms:

• Include synonyms for your search terms. For example: [ farming agriculture irrigation ]
• Avoid very general words since they will not help narrow down your results. Some words are so common that most search engines are programmed to ignore them. Examples: "how", "the", "and", etc.
• You do not need to phrase your search as a question. In general, using fewer words that are descriptive and specific to the results you want will be best. For example, searching for: [ How do I make oatmeal raisin cookies? ] will yield some good results, but a better search would be: [ baking recipe oatmeal raisin cookies ].
• Try entering your search terms in a different order. Search engines can produce different results depending on the order of the search terms.
• Check the spelling of your search terms.

Adding quotation marks around a set of words will search web sites for the exact wording that is contained within the quotes. This search technique is very useful to find people or specific titles of books, movies, etc. For example, searching for [ Robin Williams ] will return websites that contain the word [ Robin ] immediately followed by "Williams". However, a Web page containing the following sentence would NOT be found using this method unless it contained "Robin Williams" elsewhere on the page:

Adding a minus sign before a word will specifically exclude pages that contain that word. Be careful not to leave a space between the minus sign and the word you want to exclude.

For example, searching for [ Tomato recipes -soup -pizza ] will return Web pages containing [ tomato recipes ], but will not return any Web pages containing either [ soup ] or [ pizza ]. To exclude more than one word from a search, you need a minus sign before each word that you want to exclude.

Typing the word OR between search terms will search for websites that include either of the words, but not necessarily both. OR must be entered in all capital letters to use this function.

For example, you might search for: [ farming OR agriculture ]. This search will return Web pages that mention either farming or agriculture (or both)

You can use Zuula to search within a specific website, or a top level type of website, ones ending in ".edu" for example. At the end of your search box, type in [ site: ] followed by the site or type of Web page you would like to search. Let's say you wanted to find articles on ESPN.com about the Seattle Mariners. You could perform the following search: [ Seattle Mariners site:espn.com ]. Your search will show results for the Mariners only on the ESPN website.

You can also use this feature to limit your search to a particular type of website by typing a top level Web domain following the colon.

For example, if you wanted to search for salaries of football players in the UK, you could perform the following search: [ football salaries site:.co.uk]. The search results will come exclusively from UK websites with the top level domain .co.uk. Limiting the domain will help you find the information you want by eliminating most Web pages about American football from the search results.

Example top level domains are

• .com - for profit companies
• .net - for profit, usually internet related companies
• .org - non-profit organizations
• .edu - educational institutions
• .gov - U.S. government and agencies
• .jp - Japanese
• .gov.au - Australian governement