Power Up Your Search Box Strategy

  • Strip the stopwords from your queries.
  • Build queries with keywords likely to exactly match the information you are looking for.
  • Enter those keywords in the search box.
  • View the results and refine your search

Search box with Animals danger extinct circled in read. To construct a query rather than ask a question, enter precise keywords in the search box.

The 1 in 5 Principle - Are you feeling Lucky?

Your goal is to find a combination of keywords that are an exact match for the wording in the documents you seek. Different authors use different words to describe the same thing. According to psychologists, your chances of choosing exactly the same concept word as a web page author are 1 in 5. This means you can expect to revise your query more than once before finding just the right combination of terms.

picture of hamburger: surrounded by words: hamburger, cheeseburger, ground beef patty, burger, Whopper, caption: You have a 1 in 5 chance of matching an author's words.

Cartoon Image of a computer reading from paper text. Listen


Authored by Dennis O'Connor 2003-2004