Sometimes typing in search words brings up many more pages than are useful, but there are a number of tricks that can help you narrow down your search results. Searching for a single word can produce many irrelevant results, so it is best to try to think of other words which will help narrow things down.

Think also about the phrases that are likely to be on the website that would answer your question. When using Google, for example, putting quotation marks around a phrase tells Google to search for exactly that particular word order.

If you know that you are likely to find the information you are after in a particular site you can use the site: restriction feature to direct Google to look just in that site. For example, searching for site:www.theyworkforyou.com diabetes will highlight any time the word ‘diabetes’ is mentioned in parliamentary discussions recorded by the Hansard Society.

A web page needs only to contain the words used in your search to show up in the results but it does not mean that the page is actually about your topic of interest. The useful ‘cached’ function that appears next to most of the individual search results will show you a version of the page with your search terms highlighted in different colours. This lets you see at a glance how often your search word(s) appear in the page as well as the proximity of the words, which can give you a feel of the page’s relevance to you.