Once you have some familiarity with the basic features, it is then worth exploring the advanced features of an engine. These features generally allow you to narrow the number and type of returns you receive to the most relevant.
Clearly the best initial strategy for limiting the relevance and number of returns is to use terms that are as specific or distinctive as possible; it can also be a useful technique to enter a longer phrase when initiating searching. The key feature of search engines is that they will produce results which reflect exactly what you have typed into them, which is clearly a very powerful limiting mechanism.
Often, the best way to start is by entering keywords, although remember that when you do this, most engines will look for documents in which each word you have entered figures, no matter how far apart the words appear in the document (unless you can provide the engine with a proximity figure – a feature of Alta Vista) and regardless of whether they are related to one another in any particular fashion.
However, there are two basic ways to tell an engine to return only sites containing your exact phrase. First, you can use “ ”, which tells the engine to find exactly what is contained in the quotation marks.
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