If you are having difficulty in finding what they're looking for on the internet then you may not understand the real benefit that GetRecognised provides.

These are tips endorsed by the search engines themselves to help you find what you're looking for first time,every time.

To illustrate this section we're going to use an example. In this case we'll use the example of someone who is looking to purchase a Gibson guitar from a UK outlet. This is a fairly typical example. Here, we know more or less what we are looking for, we now just need to find a few suppliers so we can find the best price.

This search was done for real on October 4 th 2000. Don't use single words If you know what you're looking for then tell the search engine. The more vague your search term is the less relevant the listings will be. In this example don't simply put in 'guitars'. Single words are never a good idea because: "Most people don't enter single words when they search because they end up getting too many irrelevant pages." ('Internet magazine', Oct. 2000 issue). When we did, all of Google results related to American based companies and none were to do withGibson. The same was true of AltaVista. A better search would be 'Gibson guitars' or 'Gibson dealer'.

Specify the country
Most people in the UK would prefer to buy from a UK company. Postage is cheaper, you can deal in pounds and you can easily phone the company up. However America dominates the internet. You must therefore tell the search engines you are only interested in UK sites. There are 2 ways of doing this.

Firstly, you can simply use the .co.uk version (e.g. www.lycos.co.uk, www.excite.co.uk ) which should restrict all foreign sites. In our example, using www.altavista.co.uk, all of the top 10 were UK sites.

Secondly you can add words such as 'uk', 'in the uk' or 'england' at the end of your search term.. In our example a better search would be 'gibson guitars uk'.

Distinguish between commercial and personal sites In this example we are looking to buy and are therefore looking for a commercial site. The GetRecognised Programme deals with commercial sites but it is important to remember that the internet is by no means purely a business tool. There are personal, non-profit making websites about virtually anything. In this example you do not particularly want to find a site written by someone whose hobby is collecting guitars. Similarly if you are looking to buy a car you do not want to see a 'fan' site about Ferraris and if you want to buy a book you do not want a tribute site about the author.

One way to make sure the sites that appear in the search engine's listings are commercial is to use keywords like 'dealer', 'retailer', 'shop' or 'mail order' in your phrase.

Tell the search engine you are looking for a phrase One of the most common mistakes people make on search engines is typing in a string of words and expecting the engine to under -stand what you are looking for. A phrase like 'gibson guitars uk' may look fine but when we typed this into AltaVista none of the top ten sites were related to UK guitar shops and only one -the official Gibson website - was specifically related to Gibson.

What has happened here is the engine has looked for any site pertaining to Gibson, any site pertaining to guitars and any site per -taining to the UK. As a result it has found no less than 104,910 sites!

You need to tell the search engine that it is a phrase you are looking for. The main way of doing that is by putting the whole phrase in speech marks. The search engine will then only bring up sites that contain those words in that order. The number of pages it brings up will be reduced and the relevance of those it does will be much greater.

Other techniques
In addition to speech marks there are other ways of telling search engines what you are looking for. You can put a string of words together with plus signs e.g.
'gibson+guitars+uk'.
This has much the same effect as putting the phrase in speech marks. You can also combine the 2 approaches e.g. "Gibson guitars"+uk'. Minus signs can also tell a search engine what you don't want to see. For example by putting in '"gibson guitars"-acoustics' you make sure only sites about electric guitars appear.

These are the main techniques but there are a number of different approaches one can take. Several search engines have areas on their sites which gives advice about advanced searching techniques. The approaches given above are the most useful and most simple.