KEYWORDS

It will be helpful to understand a few basic concepts about keywords before you begin searching:

Selecting your keywords: Try to think of several synonyms or phrases that will best describe your research topic. Do not always rely on one word only as that word may not have appeared in a document's title and it may be that the search engine you've selected only indexes titles. At the same time, do not limit your search too tightly as the documents searched may have the keywords in various orders.
Boolean operators: Most search engines use some form of the Boolean operators "and", "or", & "not". Some give you boxes to check for your boolean selection, others automatically assume "and" is being used and still others require you to type in the boolean operator. Some such as Lycos may even consider your word a substring: a search for "cat" may turn up articles on "caterpillar" if a period is not placed after the word (cat.). Take the time to acquaint yourself with your search engine's searching language technique. It may pay off in a more useful results list.
PERL searches: Some search engines even use a PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language). This is a scripting language designed for UNIX computers. An "or" search would be conducted by typing "United States|USA".
Contiguous Strings: Some software will match your keyword strings only if they occur in exactly the order in which you type them; for example, searching for "Chicago Blackhawks" will return information only about the Chicago Blackhawks and not on the city of Chicago.