Goodwill Community Foundation creating
opportunities for a better life
we're going to talk about how to do an
effective search online if your browser
has a built-in search bar or support
searching in the address bar you can use
that for convenience or you can go
straight to the search engine you want
I'm going to use Google the truth is
Google is a very good search engine most
of the time it can find what you're
looking for even if you don't know what
you're doing but it can't hurt to learn
a few strategies say we're looking for
recipes online but we're not sure what
we want to make we'll keep it simple and
just start typing the word recipes this
prompts the search box to give us a list
of suggestions suggestions are great
because they can give you an idea for a
search that you might not have thought
of
you can click one of the suggestions or
just keep typing as you can see you
don't need to worry about case
punctuation or even using complete
sentences hopefully we'll find some good
cookie recipes these are our search
results there are also some ads at the
top and sometimes you'll find them to
the right - if you see what you're
looking for you can click the link if
not you may want to reconsider your
search terms for example you could make
them more specific or search for
different words altogether suppose we
don't want cookies with chocolate in
them we can tell the search engine to
exclude those results by typing a hyphen
or a minus sign followed by the word we
want to exclude notice that there is no
space after the - so it's recipes
cookies - chocolate this should have
gotten rid of all the chocolate chip
cookie recipes there's still a pretty
good variety to choose from but I see
they're sort of a sugar cookie recipe
here and that sounds really good so I'm
going to try searching for that to get
as many recipes as I can we want to put
sugar cookies in quotes so Google
searches for that specific phrase
otherwise we might get results for other
types of cookies that just happen to
have sugar in the ingredients these
results look good because we have a lot
of recipes to choose from and they're
all pretty much what we're looking for
however we could refine them even more
using the options below the search box
here we have different types of content
to choose from like images maps and
shopping to view even more options open
the menu that says more this is also
where you can access special search
tools that will let you filter your
results these options will change
depending on what you're looking for
giving you even more control over the
pages resources and other things that
you find for now why don't we do a
visual search for cookie recipes by
switching over to images now we can just
browse through pictures to see if
there's anything we like
these look really good but wouldn't it
be great if we could just watch a video
to learn how to make cookies we can do
that all we have to do is switch over to
videos again using the options near the
top of the page this will give us a lot
of how-to videos which should really
come in handy now you can experiment
with your own search terms and just
remember that most of the time more
specific search terms yield better
results
you