How often have you spent an hour on the Internet and still not found "the site" that you need for tomorrow's class? Effective searching allows teachers to spend less time wandering on the web (although wandering can be very productive). Below are suggestions for helping teachers find quickly the material they need leaving more time for the millions of other things that teachers need to do.

When you choose a keyword, keep in mind that many search engines distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters. So "Education" and "education" will produce different results. Use lowercase letters to pull a larger number of results because it searches both upper and lowercase. If you are searching for a title, make sure you put it in capital letters.

Many search engines distinguish between singular and plural letters. So "lesson" and "lessons" will produce different results. Try using an asterisk on the right side of a word to tell search engines to pull all variations of the word. The construction lesson* should pull "lesson" and "lessons."

Keep synonyms in mind when you search. When you search for the word "dog" try the word "canine" as well. The Excite search is an exception. When you use that search engine, "dog" will also search "canine." It uses fuzzy logic to search for synonyms as well.

A final word about keyword searching. Sometimes parts get greater results than the whole. In other words, if teachers are looking for history sites, the more specific terms teachers use will yield better results. So the phrase "Civil War" would yield better results than "American history."

Some search engines allow people to combine terms and build a more complicated search. Not all search engines allow these. Sections labeled "Tips", "Advanced Search" or "Search Strategies" usually explain what the search engine can handle.

AND- combines two terms math AND activities

OR- gives engines a choice math Or science

NOT- eliminates a portion of results math Not geometry

Quotation Marks- treats words as a phrase "lesson plans "

Capital Letters- treats words as a phrase Language Arts

Try several search engines and record what worked below.

When you have searched and come up with more results than you want to go through look for the options to "search within those results", "more like this" and "add another term." All of those options take your current results and allow teachers to refine their search. For instance, teachers may have searched for lessons in science and gotten three million results. If the option is available teachers could search within those results and add a grade level. That should bring the number of results down to a more manageable size.

4. Using Forms

Because Boolean algebra (And, Not, Or) isn't always easy to use, some search engines have developed forms, that allow teachers to put in multiple terms and define more clearly what it is they are looking for. Forms usually contain drop down boxes in which teachers make choices about what they are searching for. Below are some search engines that provide forms.

Clicking on Advanced Search takes people to a search form that allows users to combine multiple terms and even to choose which domain to look for results. Choose the .edu domain to restrict search results to education domains.

Excite searches not only for the word that you put in the search box, but also for related terms. When you get the results the "More Like This" option pulls up more of the results that you want. Clicking on Search Tips on the screen gives you all kinds of information. The usual syntax options work in Excite and are described in Advanced Search Tips. Clicking on Power Search, next to the search button, takes you to search form.

Next to your search button in Yahoo, you have a link Advanced Search. Click on it and you get a screen where you can make all kinds of search choices such as number of links or an acceptable age for the links.

This is another multi- search engine. It is a powerful tool that searches other engines, strips out redundancy, and presents the findings in one long list. The options for different ways of searching with Profusion are on the front page.

This is a search engine that crawls many search engines and lists the results of what it finds in each. On the upper, left-hand side of the opening screen, clicking on Custom Search allows you to pick which engines you want included in the search as well as the sequence of the engines.