Search Engines

Search engines allow you to search the World Wide Web for specific information. 
Without these search engines you would not easily locate details for your particular quest. 
Everyone has their favourite search engine but you should be aware of the limitations of each to ensure your search is always getting the best results.

Internet Search engines just look for words in files on computers. They’re stupid, with no Intellect. So you need to be the smart one, and organize your thinking to refine the idea of what you're looking for.

A great way to organize thinking is math, like the term: [(67 x 1.5) + 10] - 4 = 106.5. Numbers and values are grouped and divided by operators, like times, plus, minus or equals. 

You can do exactly the same thing with words.

Mr. Boole was a mathematician. He invented a way of organizing questions. It is called Boolean logic and uses four operators: - AND, OR, NEAR and NOT.

If you can order a hamburger, you can find something on the Internet. Think of your search as a question and use Mr. Boole’s operators. You can narrow the search and focus on the words you really want.

It's like hamburger AND cheese AND lettuce OR tomato NOT onions.

Be sure to use big CAPITAL letters for AND, OR, NEAR and NOT. When you want to keep words together, put them inside quote marks, as in “dill pickle” 

— OUR QUESTION —
WHAT ARE THE NAMES
OF GUITAR STRINGS?

We looked for the word guitar on the Google search site and got 98,100,000 files with the word guitar somewhere in their text. Not exactly a focused search. 

We added the word strings, and, guitar strings narrowed it down to 12,600,000 files.

Next we put the words together in quote marks, “guitar strings” which returned 2,080,000 hits.

“guitar strings” AND names AND notes gave us 195,000 files. But a lot of them were selling guitars, so we added another operator.

"guitar strings” AND names AND notes NOT $ gave us 165,000 hits. Checking through the first two pages of those finds we saw the names of the strings are EADGBE.

You can keep narrowing your focus by using AND, NOT, NEAR and OR. Make sure you select Boolean phrase or Advanced Search from the search Web Site you use.

Some search sites use + for AND, - for NOT and | for OR. Make sure to attach the mark to the front of the word like: “guitar strings” +name +notes -$ (Note: - there are no spaces after + and - )