The performance of Search Engines are steadily improving and the problem areas are indeed getting narrower. Today, search engines have attained levels of excellence to serve up fast and relevant information whenever the browser wants it. But problems do arise when you type in a wrong Web address that leads you to a wrong site or receive a number of confusing error messages. You must learn the art of reaching the right website.

We must recognize that spelling errors commonly occur when typing the web addresses. Web addresses must be typed totally free from all errors as each slash, dash, and dot can sabotage your attempts in accessing the required web site.

When you type a Web address into the Address box of your Web browser, if the message you get states the page cannot be found, you have obviously made some mistakes in typing the web address. Check once again the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of the Web address.

Many search engines are not always sensitive to uppercase or lowercase. For instance, if you type a word in lowercase, search engines will search for all variations. For example, if you search for the word "stores," the search engine will match "Stores," "STORES," and "stores," but if you search for the term "Stores," the search engine will not return sites with the terms "stores" or "STORES."

Whenever you receive the message, "Server error" or "Server is busy," you can experiment with clicking the 'Refresh' button or pressing 'Enter'. You may have presumably caught in traffic jam on the Internet and this is no fault of yours. These error messages are like your getting an engaged tone or a busy signal on the telephone when dialing. The simple message is 'try again'

Quite often it happens you do not get the type of information you are seeking and the results are disappointing. The reason is you have worded in such a manner that has narrowed down the scope of the search engine. Try removing specific terms, or any particular word or phrase and substitute them with synonyms, or more general terms. Are you often confronted with a message that 'page cannot be found'. This happens when a file has been removed or renamed.

When you follow a link and get an error response like - 'File not Found' or '404' or 'Internet Explorer cannot open' - then the reason may be the search engine may be out of date or the URL may have changed, or the site has been permanently gone.

If you find the URL unduly long, the technique is rather simple. All you need to do is delete everything in the address after the first slash. The shortened URL will take you to the main home page for the Web server. When you run into an error message that reads "A connection with the server could not be established, Operation timed out" This is nothing more than a busy signal or, in extreme cases, a power outage. All you have to do is to try again later - the problem is probably with the computer at the other end.

Of course, there are the Multiple Search Engines, otherwise called Meta Search Engines. These search engines query several other web search engine databases in parallel and then combine the results in one list. These multiple search engines are indeed a laudable effort helpful in many ways. However, the problems one encounters with Meta Search Engines are many. They are plagued by time-outs, when search processing takes too long. Since most only retrieve the top 10-50 hits from each search engine, the total number of hits retrieved may be far fewer than found by doing a direct search on one of the search engines.