Searching the Web


When I began my search on Ask Jeeves.com I typed in “Healthy Food” and 39,000,000 results appeared. The first ten hits were extremely relevant to my intended search, offering healthy food choices, fitness information and healthy recipes. The first web site that appeared was the Food Network (http://www.foodnetwork.com/healthy-eating/index.html). It gave great ideas for healthy, delicious recipes. As I continued to browse through the first ten pages of results, I was becoming overwhelmed by all the different web sites offered. Some were for more specific types of diets then others.

Learning different ways to prepare healthy foods is always interesting and a lot of times it allows for me to learn a new way of cooking something that I would not have known before. However, there were just too many results. So, in order to focus on low-carb options, I went to advanced search and in “all of these words” box I kept healthy foods and in the “one or more of these words” I typed “low carb”, “sugar-free”, and “Vitamin C.” Because I focused my search on three specific topics, the amount of hits decreased by almost 35,000,000! That is an incredible amount.

After this experience, I now know that in order to have a better focus on what I am looking for, I should advance my search or include more/less words in my search. For example, instead of just typing in “healthy food”, I typed in low carb healthy food and received 683,000 hits. The first ten were extremely relevant to my search and gave recipes or ideas for a low carb eating habit.