HOW TO SEARCH
(using AltaVista as an example)

This type of search is based on the idea of guessing which words will appear in the pages you want. The AltaVista Advanced Search is one of the systems with a useful range of options for narrowing down the search, using WORDS, not SUBJECTS. (For those who are technically minded, it uses what are called Boolean operators, words like AND and NOT, to create relationships between the keywords in your query.)

Say you are interested in information on French people in India:
french and india means you get all the pages where the two words are somewhere in that document: many, many pages, and often there will be no connection at all between the two words in question.

french near india means you will get all pages where the two words occur within ten words of each other (for some search engines, it is in the same paragraph): many fewer pages.

"french in india" means the words must appear in that exact order: very few pages (but can you be sure the pages you want will use the words in exactly that order?)

But you are not interested in history; you only want material about French people in India in 1998: write french and india and 1998

Say you want material on the whole of the 1990s: french and india and 199* (the asterisk will cover the mention of any year from 1990 to 1999)

In a similar way, you can write ind* to cover Indian. Up to five characters beyond that root will be covered by the search. (You can also use an asterisk when you are unsure of the spelling: lab*r will get you both labour and labor.)

You can cut out information you do not want: french and india and not 19** should remove mention of things in the last century (but be careful about this - it can be useful, but it could also omit any material about French in the 18th century which includes, say, the words "published in 1995")

You can specify particular hosts, as in (host: .gov), to get only government sites, or you could specify url: or title: before the search words, so as to get only sites where the word you seek is in the address of the file or the title of the site. You could specify (domain: in) to get just sites in India, but that would cut out sites registered overseas (eg .com sites) or foreign sites about India.

If you use all lower-case words, they match everything; if you use capital letters at the start of words, they will only match the words written exactly like that.

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