Why Searches Fail

Search engines are getting better, but it’s very common to get thousands of results for even weird searches. A search on Google for milk AND dinosaurs gets over 1.5 million results. And many of the results don’t seem to be relevant to either topic.

Why?

The search engines we have been using look at every word on the web page. So the word "milk" may be separated by hundreds of words from "dinosaurs."

Google lists search results by how much a web page is linked to--the more other web sites link to a page, the higher it will be in the list. That usually works well, but the best page may not be the one with the most links to it, so it's smart to look through at least a few screens of results.

Now go to your worksheet and list keywords for your topic.