Finding Information on the Web
By far, the best search engine on the World Wide Web is Google, which is located and maintained at Stanford University. Google allows for phrase searches, for combination (boolean) searches, and for domain limitations. For example, if you wanted to find small business sites run by government agencies, you would type in the following (including spaces and punctuation):
"small business" site:.gov
The Google command for domain limitation is site:, followed by the domain you wish to limit results to, such as government agencies (.gov), universities (.edu), not-for-profit organizations (.org), and military sites (.mil). By typing site:.gov in the above search, you are telling the search engine to return only those sites that come from government agencies. The Google command for a phrase search is enclosing the phrase within quotes. So when you typed "small business" (in quotes), you tell the search engine not to return sites with the word small in them, unless that word is immediately followed by the word business. The space between the two commands takes the place of the boolean operator and, thus allowing you to combine terms.
Try typing the following into Google:
"small business" Louisiana site:.org
This search will return sites about small businesses in Louisiana that come from not-for-profit organizations.
The other excellent search engine on the web is called All The Web. However, it is not as intuitive as Google. You have to click on Advanced Search in order to get it to handle phrases correctly, or in order to limit your results by domain extension. Still, alltheweb.com allows some commands that Google does not, so if you need to do an expert search, give it a try.
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