I tried them on Google -- and # 3 got me lots of sites with poodles. See how I found dog sites without any references to poodles.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=dogs+-poodles

Can you help with this question?

You want to do a search on the internet
for dogs but do not want pages that
reference poodles. What might you type
into Google to accomplish this?

1. "dogs" poodles
2. dogs or poodles
3. dogs NOT poodles
4. dogs-poodles

wouldn't #3 be the best answer?

You would use dogs-poodles

wouldn't all the sites give poodles?
I tried #3 and #4 and both sites give
poodles. so does #1 and #2. Help, i am confused.

Search for

dogs -poodles

Notice that there's a space after dogs -- but no space between -poodles.