Poet's Corner

[E.]

I am not an expert, in fact I hadn't heard about the underlinings thing. What I do is, if what I want is defined by a phrase, I put the phrase in quotes.

Like, say I am having a New Year's Eve party and want to order party hats.

If I put "party hats" in, I get 18,000 hits all of which have the two words linked together, which is what I would want. For example, these free party hats I could print out on my color printer, lol!:

http://www.acriticaleye.com/free/index_hats.html

But if I just put party hats, no quotes, I get 328,000 hits, some of which will have both 'party' and 'hats' in them, but might say, oh, "Hats off to the Communist party!" or something.

The world is so various and the net is so much fun. This is the first hit in both cases:

http://www.fatchicksinpartyhats.com/

If I don't get hits using one formulation, I try others. The thing to keep in mind is that it's about words and not concepts. My hubby, who is a lot smarter than I am, doesn't google as productively as I do because he can't seem quite to grasp that. I get to make fun of his searches! (In mitigation I should mention that he's very new to the computer.)