The most important part of any search is what you enter into the search box. This will determine the quality of the information you will receive back. The Internet is teaming with good data and you just need to know how to find it. If you are not sure how to enter in a vague term to find information, look for the Help link around the search engine box.

Also try using quotation marks when looking for an exact phrase. An example would be if you want to find what movie "Show me the money!" was in. If you simply put in the box, show me the money, the search engine will look for results for each of the words, as opposed to the phrase. If you are struggling to find results with a set of words, think about rearranging them. This may produce different results and provide you with the information that you are looking for.

Some search engines are also case-sensitive. If you put in the word or phrase you are looking for with upper-case letters, you will only have upper-case results returned to you. Using lower-case will allow your results to return both lower-case and upper-case results. If you only put in part of a word, say "pen", oftentimes results will come back for any words with "pen" in it. This could bring back penance or repent among other words.

This can help when searching for key words, as explained in an upcoming email. There is also the question of which search engine you should use for a specific search. As well as the three major search engines, MSN, Yahoo and Goggle, there are also a number of smaller search engines. With so much choice, doing a search can sometimes prove confusing.

Google is the biggest in terms of the percentage of population which uses the search engine at 49.2%., according to Nielsen NetRatings, at website: http://searchenginewatch.com Yahoo carries 23.8% of the search engine traffics, MSN: 9.6%, AOL: 6.3%, Ask Jeeves, 2.6%, and the rest of the search engines carry 8.50%.

Google is considered by many to be the strongest search engine because of the number of pages it has indexed. The results of your searches can be partially based upon the number of pages which are indexed. Google claims to have indexed 8.1 billion pages, MSN: 5.0 billion pages, Yahoo: 4.2 billion pages, and Ask Jeeves: 2.5 billion pages. The search engines will find the information that you need in the pages that they have indexed.

That is why Goggle is widely regarded as the best search engine, with over 8 billion indexed pages. However, the above figures are self reported and should be taken with a pinch of salt. While each search engine provides much of the same information, due to the widely differing indexing figures above, some websites will appear in some engines and not appear in others. In conclusion, it would be prudent to use all the engines when searching for important information, as they all have something to offer.