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Click on a tab to view a listing of all the TryScience activities by type, topic, or age group, or to search the world of science centers.


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The search engine on TryScience.org searches the websites of hundreds of science centers around the world for you! One of them surely has what you are looking for. Enter your query into the search box at the bottom of all TryScience.org pages.

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Didn't find what you wanted? Found too much? Try narrowing your search:

  1. Use quotation marks to group several words into a phrase. Example: Canada "science center" finds documents that contain either the phrase "science center" or the word Canada.

  2. To get the most relevant documents at the top of the list, enter several synonyms for the topic. Example: space rockets probes instead of just one of those words increases the chance of finding documents about rockets.

  3. Use a "Boolean" query by putting AND, OR, AND NOT, NEAR between your keywords. AND, OR, AND NOT do what they imply: Example: experiment AND biology will return listings with both keywords, whereas experiment AND NOT biology will return all experiment listings but no biology (and no biology experiment). Using NEAR between keywords will literally search for those keywords near one another.

  4. A plus sign (+) in front of a word means that word must be in pages for them to be a match. A minus sign (-) in front of a word means that any page that has that word is excluded from the list of matches.

  5. If you type a word all in lower case, AltaVista will search for both lower and upper case. But if any letter is in upper case, AltaVista searches for the capitalized version of the letter only. Example: TryScience will match the keyword exactly.

  6. At AltaVista, all punctuation is created equal. It doesn't matter if it is a period, a comma, a slash, an underscore, or a hyphen -- they are all the same. You get all the results in spite of minor variations. Example: PDP-11/70 matches PDP1170 and PDP/11-70 and PDP_11/70, to name a few.

  7. You are probably used to using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard that can stand for missing letters or words in a search query - the asterisk can only appear after a minimum of three characters and can stand for from zero to five characters.

    a.) For example, if you want to search for the English spelling as well as the American spelling of a word like color (colour), you can throw in an asterisk where the "u" would be. Or you could use an asterisk to stand for either "er" or "re" at the end of a word: colo*r theat*

    b.)You can use an asterisk to stand for the plural, so you can search for both singular and plural at the same time: dog* bush*

    c.)You can also use an asterisk when you are uncertain about the spelling of a word, for instance about whether a certain letter should be doubled: carib*ean