Searching by Means of Search Engines

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This is where things start to get complicated.
Search engines are trickier than they look! You'll discover this the first time you enter a query on C++, the programming language. At least of the Web search engines will essentially say, "Huh?"

C++ is not a word. It's a letter followed by two characters that might, depending on the index, be regarded merely as punctuation. Many text search engines have trouble handling input of this type. Many don't deal too well with numbers, either. So much for "007," "R2D2,"or "Catch-22."

Important Note: This problem is no longer as bad as it used to be. I'm now finding relevant hits for C++ on a majority of search engines sites.

Here's another example of a text string search engines hate: To be or not to be. Just about anyone who finished junior high school will be able to tell you where the phrase comes from and (possibly!) what it means. But some search engines choke because all the words in the phrase are stop words--i.e., unimportant words too short and too common to be considered relevant strings on which to search. However, if you enclose the query in quotation marks, forcing the search engine to find the words, "to be or not to be" in that precise order, most search engines can recognize the phrase as a famous quotation from Hamlet.

Let's take a less obvious example. Suppose you're a fan of murder mysteries and you want to search the Web for the home pages of all your favorite authors in that genre. If you simply enter the words "mystery" and "writer," most search engines will return hyperlinks to all Web documents that contain the word "mystery" or the word, "writer." This will probably include hundreds--or even thousands--of URLs, most of which will have no relevance to your search. If you enter the words as a phrase, however, you stand a better chance of getting some good hits.

However, as search technology advances, this is not as much of a problem as it was a couple of years ago. Many search engines will now automatically apply the "adjacency" operator when responding to a two-word query. This means that they will indeed look for documents in which your two words appear next to each other.
If you understand how search engines organize information and run queries, you can maximize your chances of getting hits on URLs that matter.