Guide to the Internet

The first workshop ensured that you had the necessary skills (Win 9x and browser) to navigate the Internet. There was a description of how search engines work, and the difference between directories and search engines.

Recognising that there was no single all-purpose tool for searching the Internet, efforts were made to learn an effective general purpose search strategy. A basic search strategy was outlined, which aimed to satisfy 80% of your searches within about five minutes.

The strategy required you to classify your question into one of three categories (concept, specific topic or fact) on the basis of the 'broadness' of the question and also on the basis of the possible number of web pages which might be out there. Having decided which type of question you were asking, a hierarchy of search tools was recommended.

Category

Description

Number of web pages you imagine to be on the web

Tool

Recommendation

Concept

Topic

Fact

Broad Area (like a book or a large chapter)

Circumscribed Area (like a small chapter or a ten-page handout)

Data (Could be answered as a single sentence or as a data table)

Directories

Keyword indexed search engines

Search engines with thesaurus or meaning based searching

Metasearch engines

Full text indexed search engines

Natural language query search engines

On-line databases

Yahoo
Open Directory
About
Argus Clearinghouse
Librarians' Index to the Internet
Internet Public Library
WWW Virtual Library

Excite
Lycos
Oingo

Ixquick
Dataware
Inference Find

AltaVista
Google
Northern Light

Ask Jeeves!

The Invisible Web
Lycos Searchable Databases,
Search IQ Directories
The BigHub.com

Rule 1: Be as specific as you can (minimum of three keywords)

Rule 2: Know which search engines/directories are best suited to your question

Rule 3: Perform your search in several search engines simultaneously

Rule 4: Log off and analyse your search results before clicking on the links

If the initial search did not reveal any promising links in the first ten results from each search engine, it was suggested that it is better to refine your search rather than trawling through pages of results in the hope of finding the one you want. The methods suggested, in approximate order of usefulness are listed below.

Search technique

Description

Use as many terms as possible

search engine guide tutorial

Be specific - use several words, separated by spaces. It is very rare to find no hits because you have typed in too many words. It is all too common to find many thousands of hits because you have not typed in enough.

Remember also that nouns are the most powerful words for searching purposes. Check your spelling, and remember American variants.

The most important keywords should be first (i.e. on the left) as the search engine determines the ranking order of the results by reading your search string from left to right.

Use phrases

"search engine" guide tutorial

Phrases (words grouped together within apostrophes) are useful if the words need to appear together rather than separately on the page.

If you don't want a phrase, but you think that the words should appear close together, then AltaVista offers a 'near' facility

Use search engine arithmetic

+search +engine +guide+ tutorial +advanced -beginner

(+) before any word means that it must be included

(-) before any word means that it must be included

NB exercise caution when using the minus sign, as it can unintentionally eliminate a lot of good hits. I use a minus mainly when I am getting a lot of hits on a completely unwanted subject, and I choose the minus word very carefully

Truncation/wild cards

math* for maths, mathematics, mathematical

colo*r for color and colour

(*) is a wildcard, meaning a placeholder for zero or more unknown characters. It is useful for:

stemming (plurals, different verb endings)
you can't remember exact spelling or there are variants

The longer the stem, the better, as a short stem (e.g. ast*) could produce hits for asthma, asthenia, asterisk etc.

Parentheses

"search engine" and (tutorial or guide)

Using a combination of Boolean logic and parentheses you can construct very complex queries.

Beware - parentheses can have unexpected results on the way search engines rank pages. There will be further discussion on parentheses in the Complex Query page.

Fields

title:"search engine" + guide

domain:uk +medical +"search engine"

host:doh.gov.uk +"clinical governance"

url:nyro

host:doh.gov.uk +"clinical governance"

link:google.com

text:"search engine"

Fields specify where the search words must appear within the web page. You will have to consult the help file for each search engine to use this, as each engine offers different fields.

title: page title must contain this text

domain: specify .uk if you just want websites located in the UK

host: page must be located on a specified server e.g. if you want to search the Department of Health server you would use host:doh.gov.uk

image: page must contain an image whose file name contains the specified text

url: pages with specified text anywhere within the url, e.g. url:uk will find http://www.doh.gov.uk/dhhome.htm as well as http://www.uk/

link: page must contain a hyperlink for which at least one of the words in the destination address begins with specified text

text: text on the page must contain search words

If you are still having problems with your search despite these techniques then the following tutorial should be of benefit. It covers advanced syntax (including Boolean logic) and the use of specialist search engines and on-line databases.

Revision