The search engines (sites de busca) organize our research on the web. Because there are millions of sites (and the number is growing everyday), without these useful tools it would be almost impossible to find the information we need.
Even if you use the search engines, doing research on the web is tremendously time-consuming. Especially if the topic of your research is something broad, such as "education". Only in Alta Vista, there are over 32 million addresses related to this topic. So the trick is: try to choose a more specific term. "ESL", for example, will lead you to "only" 785 addresses. It is a little better.
If you type "English as a second language", though, the result may be disastrous: in many of the search engines, like Altavista, the system will believe that you are looking for any of these words, and will return an even vaster list: it will simply sum up the occurrences of English + as + a + second + language.
There are some commands that might help in restricting the number of sites to something reasonable:

And : By writing "and" between two terms, you will tell the search engine you only want to be referred to sites where both words are present. (esl and activities)

The symbol + : Almost the same as using "and": use it before the main word and before the next word that makes the search more specific. For example, +esl+activities. The engine will also return sites where both the terms esl and activities occur.

The symbol - : It excludes an aspect of the term you are not interested in. For example: esl-university. The search engine will exclude the sites in which the word "university" occurs.

Quotation marks " " : You can use them to keep words of a term together. For example: "lesson plans". The search engine will not return all the sites where the words "lesson" and "plans" occur, but rather those where these words occur side by side.

Other options:

Write title: esl The search engine will return only the sites which have "esl" on the title. "Interesting Things for ESL students", for example, would be on the list. That is the title for the site www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/s

Write url:esl The search engine will return only the sites which have "esl" on the URL. (The web site address). By the way, URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The famous ESL Cafe would be one of the sites listed, since its URL is www.eslcafe.com.

These are some of the best Search Engines:
Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
Excite: www.excite.com
Lycos: www.lycos.com
Go to: www.goto.com
Alta Vista: www.altavista.com
Web Crawler: www.webcrawler.com


(Adapted from an article published at: Revista Nova Escola/Sept.2000 issue)