爱思英语编者按：生活在互联网时代，搜索引擎对于每个人来说都并不陌生，百度，google每天都有着庞大的访问量。但是你知道怎样更好的利用搜索引擎吗？

The web may seem like a vast ocean when it comes to finding something you need. Thankfully, search engines can help turn oceans of information into small pools that make finding information easier.

This is Web Search Strategies In Plain English.

Before we dive in, let's talk a bit about how search works on the web. Search engines go out and try to account for every word on every web page. All this information is then organized for easy reference. When you search for a word, the search engine finds all the pages where the word appears and displays them in the search results. Usually, the pages that appear highest in the search results have lots of other web pages linking to them. Each link accesses a vote to say "this may be a good resource."

The problem is there are often too many results. You need a way to reduce the number of results, so you can find what you need. Let's look at how this works.

Say you're looking for a specific kind of fish and these represent all the web sites on the web. Searching for fish doesn't help much. There are way too many results. You need to be more specific. Try to imagine the exact fish and describe it in the search box. You'll see that each word you use gets you closer to what you need.更多信息请访问：http://www.engbus.cn/

You can do this for any web site by imagining the web site that has your answer. What's the title of the page? What words appear on it? If you put those words in the search box, you'll get closer to finding answers.

But to be a smart searcher, you should know some basic shortcuts. Let's say you are looking for words that appear together, like a phrase or quote. An example is a search for information on "sand sharks". If you search for it like this, the search engine looks for pages with "sand" and "sharks". To get better results, put quotes around the words like this. It limits the results to the exact phrase.

Here's another shortcut. Words often have multiple meanings. Consider the word "mullet", which is both a fish and a hair style. A search for "mullet" may give you a number of results about the hair style but fewer about the fish. To remove the results about hair, place a hyphen or minus sign just before the word you want to exclude, which means show me the pages about "mullet", but take away results relating to hair.

By being specific and using words and symbols that remove useless information, you can find exactly what you need and keep the web from swallowing you whole.