Search strings
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If you like a certain search engine, such as AltaVista, you have to learn how it thinks. Let's say you want to find Sayre School's web page, so you type you search words in the box Find this:

Sayre school webpage results in: 2,073,545 pages found.
You were actually looking for a web page with the word Sayre OR the word School OR the word webpage in it. No wonder there were so many hits. A + before a word means it has to be in the resulting page.

Try typing +sayre +school +webpage

This gets us only 134 hits, but Sayre School is not amongst the top 10.
A better search string should give us very few sites so we can find our

Does capitalizing work? Yes! +Sayre +School +webpages results in only 79 sites on the Internet.

However, you can be smarter than that! A good search string gives you very few resulting web pages so in one click you can be where you want to be.

Suggestions for finding the Sayre homepage:
Add a variable that will most certainly filter only our school out.
+Sayre +School +Limestone                     63 hits
+Sayre +School +Limestone +Lexington    30 hits

Quotation marks mean that you want to find a certain exact quote.
The searches above could find Donald Sayre who works in the Limestone School in Lexington WV.

+"Sayre School" +webpage results in only 1 hit! However, it is not the Sayre School homepage. When you start looking for information, you have to do the thinking up front. "webpage" is a general word. All pages on the web are web pages. What makes our school so unique that it would be hard to miss a website with those features?

This search results in 6 hits. Every hit points to the Sayre home page, the first hit on the list was the Sayre home page itself!

 

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