Strategy | Boolean Logic | Combination Searches | Guessing URLs
- Strategy:
An easy, but inefficient, place to start searching is at an index or directory like Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com/) or Excite (http://www.excite.com/). Index sites like Yahoo divide the sites they catalogue into progressively more specific categories. These days you have to look hard on the Yahoo! site to even find the directory. You would use a directory when you have time to just browse. Think of it as going to the library and looking through the stacks just to see what you may find. Directory sites do usually have an option for just searching within the directory. Yahoo! started out as just a directory - friends at Stanford putting together a list of sites to share with friends. You can read about the history of Yahoo! at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html. . You can also check to see if there is a Web Ring (http://dir.webring.com/rw) on your interest.
Some search sites, for example Ask (http://www.ask.com/), allow you to ask a question in plain everyday language. Ask.com, like Google, will make recommendations for spelling should you transpose letters and will also suggest questions to narrow your search. You may still get better results using key words and phrases, though, even when using "natural language" engines. Ask.com used to be known as Ask Jeeves, but the butler has been retired.
You use a search engine, like HotBot (http://hotbot.lycos.com/), by giving the engine key words to look for. Google (http://www.google.com/) and All the Web (http://www.alltheweb.com/) are excellent search engines. Engines search the Internet in various ways. Some engines search a site's meta tags (descriptions written by the site's author), some look at the first 100 or so words in a site to catalogue it, while others index the whole site. If you were to submit the key word "gardening" to a search engine, you would get thousands of returns, and many will have nothing to do with what you are looking for. You can narrow your search by using Boolean logic.
- Boolean Logic and a few general tips that work with many search engines:
- Narrow your key words to narrow your search. If you have a phrase to search, put the phrase in quotes. Otherwise the engine will search for each word separately, e.g., "George Washington". Without the quotation marks you will likely get thousands of sites that contain the word "George" and/or "Washington" and may have nothing about "George Washington". Some engines use parentheses instead of quotation marks. Check the engine's Help section.
- Use Boolean logic: AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, ADJACENT, FOLLOWED BY, BEFORE, AFTER. Type these "Boolean operators" in capital letters and use spaces between the words. "George Washington" AND "Mount Vernon" is an example. With many engines you can use + for "AND" and - for "NOT". For some engines + means "look for this word" and - means "exclude this word", so you would need to put the + or - before each word. For example, to search for George Washington the person, you could ask the engine to look for +"George Washington"+Virginia-university-"District of Columbia"-state. Notice there are no spaces with this type of query. Some engines are case sensitive for capital letters and some are not. (See below.) NEAR means, as it says, the key words have to be within a certain number of words of each other. Some engines allow you to specify the range, some do not and use a default number, for example, within 10 words. Use NEAR to look for words on the same page. For example, "George Washington" NEAR "Mount Vernon". BEFORE and AFTER work the same way as NEAR. NOT may also take the form BUT_NOT, as in "George Washington" BUT_NOT university). ADJACENT and FOLLOWED BY both mean your key words will have to be next to each other on a site for the engine to report that site to you.
- Use an asterisk (*) as a wild card. Place the asterisk to the right of the word you are searching and the engine will search for that word plus variations of the word. For example if you type in row* you will find sites that have row, rower, rows, rowing, and rowed. Typing two asterisks will give you even more variations on the word. Typing **think should bring returns not only for think, thinks, thinker, thinking, but also thought, thoughtful, etc. Some search engines use the dollar sign ($) instead of the asterisk. Again, check the "Help" section of the search engine. Some also allow the use of a question mark (?) in place of a letter in a word. You may be looking for information on the dog breed, borzoi, but are unsure if it ends in an "i" or a "y". You could try searching for borzo?. You may be able to search for synonyms of a word by placing a tilde (~) in front of the word.
- You can also use parentheses to build a query. "George Washington" AND (university OR state) will get you sites about George Washington University and the state of Washington.
- Be sure to check your spelling. The engine will look for words exactly as you spelled them. If you are searching for "principal" but spell it "principle" you will be out of luck.
- Type your key words in lower case letters (unless as with George Washington in the above examples you know what you are looking for will always be capitalized). Engines will then look for the word in both upper and lower case. If you type the key word capitalized, the engine will only look for sites where the word is capitalized.
- Use synonyms to broaden a search. For example, if you are looking for information on lungs, you could also type in pulmonary and respiratory (or respire*).
- Be sure and read the help section at each site to see how that site operates. Most use at least some of the techniques listed above, and may offer drop down menus or separate engines with the Boolean logic choices so you don't have to write them out yourself. Some engines will search only by key words, others will do conceptual searches. In a conceptual search you will get sites that the engine thinks are similar in topic to what you are looking for. At least one search site even rank orders search results according to whether the person registering the site with the search engine/index registered for free or paid a fee. Those paying a fee get ranked higher when search results are returned. With the revenue from banner ads going down, some search sites have resorted to taking payment to insert comercial results at the top of search results. Some sites make it obvious and some do not. Some search sites have people review sites for inclusion in the index. Others use computers to search sites on the Internet and people don't review them at all, and each search site's computer (usually known as a "spider") categorizes the sites in a different way. That is why it is useful to use a metasearch site, like Dogpile, which simultaneously searches many engines and indexes. It really is amazing to see how different the results are from different search sites even when you use exactly the same key words to search. Vivisimo (http://vivisimo.com/) and Ixquick (http://ixquick.com/) are excellent metasearch engines. Other metasearch sites, like Kartoo , Mooter , Ujiko , and Clusty, "cluster" search results into folder or categories that can help you narrow your search.
- You can also use meta words to specify your search. For example to narrow your search to a specific time frame, you can type "after:1/1/98" in the search box along with your key words and the engine (if it is capable) will narrow the search results to sites created or modified after that date. Other meta words are domain, feature (such as video, acrobat, shockwave, frame, image), linkdomain, linktext, newsgroup, scriptlanguage, title, url, and, for time : after, before, and within (time frame). "The Whole Internet", by Conner-Sax and Krol is an excellent source for search techniques and for overall Internet information. It is published by O'Reilly.
- At any search site, be sure to check the "advanced search" option which may allow to narrow your search with check boxes for Boolean operators so you don't have to memorize them or wind up trying to use some that a particular search site cannot handle. Always check the "help" page on a search site, too, though it may be hard to find.
- Combination Searches:
Another useful way to search is to use a combination of a specific search engine, like Google, metasearch site and a cluster search site. For example, you want to find out information about hepatitis. You can use that key word at Google, but if you do not find what you want,, use Vivisimo, and to get more information use Kartoo. There are also search engines for specific topics, such as Omni Medical Search (http://www.omnimedicalsearch.com/) for medical issues and Find Law (http://findlaw.com/) for legal issues.
Try the search sites and see which ones work best for you. To help you get an idea of how two of the main search engines work, you can test Google and Yahoo! head to head at Twingine.com. View all information you find with a critical eye. Some is credible, some is not. And be patient. Sometimes the Internet is fast, and sometimes it is slow, at times, very slow. A site may be offline temporarily for updating, it may have changed its URL (address) or it may have just have vanished. If you are looking for a specific site by name, Google (http://www.google.com/)is an excellent search engine choice. It even offers an "I Feel Lucky" option. Click it and you will be taken directly to the top choice that Google found using your key words. If you use the "search" option, you will get a list of sites with a link to each site, plus an option called "cached". If you click on the link and the site is gone, click your back button to get back to Google. Then click on the "cached" option and you will be taken to the site as stored in Google's cached copy of the site. Google also features a search toolbar you can install on your browser. You can find out more about it at http://toolbar.google.com/. Yahoo! also has a tool bar. One thing you can count on, the competition among the four major contenders - Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL - is pretty fierce. When one comes up with an innovation, at least one of the others will follow. Each wants you to use their service and if possible start an account, create your own start page and come back often. Like the measure of television viewership, visitors to their sites increases their ratings and advertising revenues.
More information on using search engines can be found at The Spider's Apprentice (http://www.monash.com/spidap4.html).
- Guessing Universal Resource Locators:
Sometimes you can guess the address (Universal Resource Locator)of a particular site. Most, but not all, sites on the Web begin with www. This site does not, CNN's does not. The next step is to guess the domain name, for example, you could guess that the domain name for the Public Broadcasting System is PBS, and you would be right. This does not always work. The American Marketing Association beat the American Medical Association in the race to register the AMA domain. The last thing you need to guess is the extension and you do that by thinking about what kind of organization it is you are trying to find. Commercial sites end in .com, nonprofit organizations end in .org, the military in .mil, government sites in .gov, network sites in .net, and educational institutions end in .edu. This is not fool proof. For example, some Internet service providers' sites end in .net and others in .com. Countries outside the US have extensions as well, .ca for Canada, .de for Germany, etc. As for PBS, we can accurately guess that the address (URL) is www.pbs.org. Remember not to put any spaces in the address when you type it in. Your browser should automatically put the http:// in for you. Guessing domains is getting more iffy with the addition of other extensions such as .biz, .shop, .family, .sport, .club, .law, .med, .mp3, .ltd, .hola, .travel, .gmbh, .inc, .chat, .soc, .game, .tech, .video, .free, and .xxx.
Another method of guessing is "backing into" the URL. For example, you decide you want to find information about the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle. You use "bumbershoot festival" as the key word phrase in Google. The top ten hits include information on the history of Bumbershoot, but not the Festival's homepage. You check the URLs of the hits you got and notice the root URL for several sites is http://www.bumbershoot.org/. You can either type this into your browser and give it a try, or you can click on a link that has that root and, when you get to http://www.bumbershoot.org/history.html, look for a link to the home page of the site, or you can erase the history.html part of the URL and hit enter. You will then be taken to the homepage of Bumbershoot.
Some browser versions may be able to find the URL for you. For example, if you are interested in finding out about the space shuttle, you can type the words "space shuttle" (without the quotation marks) in the Location text box (where you would normally type in the URL), and hit enter. The browser will search for a site on "space shuttle". Watch the Location text box. The words you typed should disappear and the URL http://www.nasa.gov/ will appear and the NASA site will be downloaded to your browser. Others initiate teh default search engine for your borwser and take you to a page of search results for that key word you typed into the address bar. Some browsers also have a "What's Related" feature which will get a list of sites similar to the one you are viewing. You can use this feature for any site you are viewing. Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) technology is used for this. You can download and install an Alexa toolbar for you browser as well. Use help to learn more about your specific browser. Open the browser and either click on "help" in the tool bar or press the F1 key on your keyboard. Microsoft has information on Internet Explorer at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx. Netscape infromation is at http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/, Opera is at http://www.opera.com/ , FireFox at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/, and Safari at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/ . As with everything on the fast changing Internet, the URLs are subject to change.
Good Luck on your search and I hope you HAVE FUN. For further information on search engines, Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/) is a good resource. This page was updated on February 25, 2007.
Copyright © 1997-2007 Stan Rockwell
http://lwidomaker.com/~rockwell/index.htm