Promo: If you have heard all about the Internet having everything you need, but still can't seem to find anything you want, you might not be searching the correct way.

When I first started surfing the World Wide Web a few years ago most people would say "I can't find anything. There is nothing out there." Now I hear the opposite, but similar complaint, "I can't find anything, there is too much out there."

Learning how to search the right way can save you time and energy.

Let's go to one of the largest search engines on the Internet with over 35 million Web pages indexed, AltaVista at www.altavista.digital.com.

Now, if we want to find information on Bill Gates we type that in the search field and click on search.

With that we get over 234,000 site matches-way too many.

Since what the search engine is doing is looking for all occurrences of the word Bill or Gates on a single page, we need to force it to look for the phrase "Bill Gates" by putting quotation marks around his name. This is the single most important thing that you can do to narrow your search.

Once that is done, we are now down to 23,000, or one-tenth of the original search results. We still need to narrow it down.

The Bill Gates that we want to find has nothing to do with Microsoft Corporation and many of these pages are probably referring to him. So we want to eliminate all references by putting in a minus sign and the word Microsoft.

That cuts our query in half. Now we need to really focus in by typing in plus "Midnight Engineering." See, the Bill Gates we were looking for writes a monthly magazine called Midnight Engineering.

With that, we have dropped down to only five entries and found our selection. Using good search techniques we have gone from 234,000 potential sites to 5 sites, saving time and our sanity.

From age 6 to 96 and beyond, there is something on the Internet for everyone. I'm Jack Nelson, The Internet Tutor.