RESTRICT SEARCH: You can tell Alta Vista to restrict your search to pages at a particular website by using its host keyword. This lets you specify the address of the site that you want to search. For example, if you want to search for information on Tony Blair at the BBC News site, type "Tony Blair" +host:news.bbc.co.uk. Matches will then only be returned from that web site.

SAVE RESULTS: You can save individual search results in Alta Vista without opening the relevant web page and bookmarking it manually. Below each result, you'll see a Save to My Search link - simply click on this to add it to the list. You can access your saved results at any time by clicking on the MySearch link near the top of the page

LOSING FRAMES: When you select a search result and click Ask, AskJeeves will display the relevant web site within a frame on the same page. While this frame provides a useful way of returning to the Ask Jeeves homepage quickly, it makes it difficult to save the site's address to your list of Favorites. Click on the 'Remove Frames' button at the top of the frame. (Alternatively, you can right-click within the site, and select 'Properties', and the web address will be displayed.

ASK THE SAME QUESTION: Just below the main query box, Ask Jeeves displays questions that other users of the site have asked recently, If you see a question that you'd also like the answer to, click on the Ask button to the right of the 'Most Recent Questions About...' box and you'll be taken directly to a list of results

FIND CONTACT DETAILS: Try the following questions:
"Where can I find someone's e-mail address?" to automatically search for an e-mail address.
"How can I find someone?" to link to places where you can search for personal contact information

CACHED LINKS: Google takes a snapshot of each page as it crawls the web and stores (or 'caches') these as a backup in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the Cached link beneath a search result, you'll see the web page as it looked when it was indexed (which is not necessarily the most recent version of the page). Terms that match your query are highlighted to make it easier for you to see why the page is relevant

SIMILAR PAGES: When you click on the Similar pages link for a search result, Google automatically scouts the web for sites on related subjects. This is particularly useful if you like a web page's content, but wish it had more to say. It also means you can find a large number of resources very quickly, without having to worry about selecting the right keywords

FEELING LUCKY? To save yourself wading through search results to find the best match for your query, click the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button rather than the Google Search one. This will take you directly to the first page Google comes up with, bypassing the list of results

SEARCH DIFFERENT CATEGORIES: Click on the 'Advanced Search' link, then, on the next page, type your query into the 'Search For' box. Move down to the 'What catalog?' section, make a selection, scroll down to the bottom of the page, then 'Go Get It!

LIMIT YOUR SEARCH: To cut down on irrelevant results, you can limit your searches to specific parts of web documents. For example, if you're looking for BBC sites but not pages that simply mention the BBC, you can search by document title only. Click on the 'Advanced Search', 'What part?' section

SHOPPING SEARCHES: Lycos makes it easy to find shopping sites that sell a particular product. Simply type your query into the main search box, select 'Shopping' from the options on the right and the click 'Go Get It

TIME RESTRICTIONS: Yahoo lets you restrict your search to recent documents. To access this feature, click on the 'Advanced Search' link to the right of the Search button. On the Search Options page, enter your query into the Search box, then move down to the line 'Find only new listings added during the past...' and select a time span from the drop-down menu

SEARCHING TITLES: A quick way to search the titles of web documents for a certain word or phrase is to place t: or title: before your search query. For example, if you're searching for a site that features the word cars in its title, type t:cars or title:cars

UK OR IRELAND SPECIFIC: To reduce the number of American sites in your list of results, you may want to limit your Yahoo search to UK or Ireland sites only. Simply select the relevant option from below the main search box