The AltaVista search engine has many advanced search options, including:
1. Quotation marks " ": If you want to search for the exact phrase, media center, you would need to set it off with quotation marks.
2. The plus + and minus - signs: The plus + and minus - signs are used to require or prohibit words from a search (do not include a space between the words). EXAMPLE: blindness+school
3. The Asterisk *: This option is used as a wildcard in searches.
4. All commands can be combined in order to create very complex searches.
5. Searches are scored by an algorithm that determines which sites best match your search according to the following:

• the word(s) or phrase(s) are found near the beginning of the Internet document,
• the word(s) or phrase(s) are found near each other, and
• the word(s) or phrase(s) are found more than once.

Try Seven Steps Toward Better Searching for additional practice.

There are just a few things to remember when using the Yahoo! Search engine:
1. You must refine your search (choose all of your search options) before you initiate your search.
2. If you do not make any changes to the default setting, you will
always:

1. search the entire Yahoo! Database
2. search for the past three years
3. find listings the contain all `keys', search `keys' as substrings
4. see results listed in groups of 25

3. The options section is accessed the from Yahoo!'s main page by moving the mouse pointer to the options button and clicking.
4. While using the `browser' based search, remember that all you have to do is move the mouse pointer over the desired topic choice and click.

The SavvySearch meta search engine

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