Efficient Internet Searching

Going beyond basic text search — multimedia search and advanced logical search criteria.

Search engines can search for more than just text:

Text search — the standard keyword-based search.
Sound search — identifying a song/audio clip from a short sample, e.g. Shazam.
Image search — finding images matching keywords, or using reverse image lookup to find where a specific image appears elsewhere online / find similar images.

Advanced search criteria use logical operators (building on 10.4.4 and 11.4.4) to construct precise searches:

Operator/technique	Example	Effect
AND	"load shedding" AND Eskom	Both terms must appear
OR	cats OR dogs	Either term may appear
NOT / -	jaguar -car	Excludes results containing the second term
Quotation marks	"exact phrase"	Searches for the exact phrase, not the words separately

💡 Exam Tip

Reverse image lookup is a favourite exam example — know that its practical use is verifying whether an image is genuine/original, e.g. checking if a profile picture is stolen from elsewhere online.