PerspectiveLet's begin with a brief disclaimer. Contrary to popular belief, search engines are not necessarily the fastest and most effective approach to locating information on the Web. The reason for this can be traced back to the nature and design of the medium. Agreed, there is much more information on the Web than any library has ever held, but there are some serious challenges in indexing its vast content.
Firstly the information here is itinerant. One day your resource resides snugly in a directory (or folder) on a specified server, the next day the 'webmaster' decides to re-design the site or even shift the entire thing onto a machine located on the other side of the globe. Result? The dreaded 404-error screen ("page not found").
Secondly, the Web is dynamic. We're not dealing with dead trees and permanent ink. Content can change by the minute! That bookmarked page containing your favourite rhubarb crumble recipe today may tomorrow have changed to roast suckling pig. It's irritating we agree, but there is nothing one could do to prevent it. Finally there is a phenomenon called the 'Deep Web', a vast reservoir of Internet content, stored in non-HTML databases and estimated to be up to a 1000 times larger than the surface web that traditional search engines index.
Search engines are simple software robots. They crawl web sites periodically and index pages indiscriminately, with little or no input from the discerning intelligence of a human librarian. They currently do not address (and probably never will) the challenges outlined above.
A Google LessonHaving said all that, let's have some fun and go searchin'. Google (www.google.com) is one of the most popular search engines available on the Web at the present time so we've picked this search engine for today's search exercise. There are plenty of other search products out there and we'll mention other major ones later. One reason for Google's huge popularity is that it is one of the smartest and easy-to-use mechanical content indexing services around, employing human librarians who sort content into hierarchical directories. Thus we have the best of both worlds. There is nothing (yet) that can beat the analytical ability of the human brain...
We'll be a bit simplistic in our experiment today and all pretend that we're mad-keen Aussie anglers who want to learn how to catch flathead (That's a fine table fish, by the way).
1. Try this. Go to
www.google.com and enter the word 'Flathead' (no quotation marks) in the search form. What do you get? Around 113,000 results, right? Four pages of search results and there is not a single mention of the fish that you'd like to catch!
2. OK. Now try entering "Fishing for Flathead" (no quotation marks). The search result has improved (20,900), although Google is now returning pages about catfish in Minnesota. Not good enough - yet.
3. Now enter "Fishing for Flathead in Sydney" (no quotation marks). Suddenly we've got a whole list (861) of useful links that will get us closer to our goal of putting some gourmet quality fish on the table, haven't we?
What can we learn from this little experiment? Being quite specific and carefully formulating/refining our search criteria worked for us. This is the main concept to bear in mind when using a search engine. Never use single keywords. The way to success is to use using key phrases. Trying these phrases in different combinations can also improve results. These fundamental strategies will work with all search engines.
Using Advanced Filters and SettingsAll search engines offer advanced search options and it is beyond the scope of this article to try and cover them all. In the case of Google these options are very simple to use.
Firstly there are some fundamental
preferences that you may set. You can for instance select the languages of the search results to be returned. If you can't read texts in languages other than English, then you may as well filter out non-English results. Say you're looking for information on the Prussian historical icon Sancoussi, then you'd probably have little use for the hundreds of German pages that an ordinary search would throw up. You can also use the preferences option to indicate how many results to display per page. (Google defaults to 10 results per page).
Advanced search features allow a further narrowing of your search, thereby increasing the likelihood of finding exactly what you're looking for. As an example, let's apply these words in our advanced search at Google.com.
online
learning
flexible
delivery
In the "Find Results" area of the advanced search feature, Google provides options for:
*All the words: Searches for every word you've included and will bring up pages containing all four words, irrespective of whether these words are used in the same phrase, sentence or paragraph.
*Exact phrase: This is where you can specify a particular phrase or word string. If you typed "online learning" in here, it would find pages with this exact phrase, but wouldn't include pages that simply contained the words "online" or "learning".
*Any of the words: In this example, using our four words, Google would bring up any page that contained any of these words. This is a very broad search criterion - only use this option if you are intend to include lots of related words, or if the terms you are looking for are very specific or specialist.
*Without the words: This is where you are able to
exclude words. For instance, if you were searching for "flexible delivery" but didn't want any pages that referred to online learning, you would type the words "online learning" in this section of the advanced search page.
(*Please note that Google allows you to use a combination of these four options
in the same search.)
The
language and
date options are fairly self-explanatory.
Occurances is an useful option, allowing you to specify whether you'd like Google to search for your words in the
title of the document or webpage,
url address or anywhere within the
page itself.
Domains is an especially useful feature and is available as an advanced option in many search engines. It allows you to narrow your search to pages from a specific country (eg if you typed ".au" in here, you would only receive results from Australian sites). It also allows you to narrow your search to specific types of organisations (eg if you typed ".edu" in here, you would only receive results from educational institutions around the world). We use this one all the time.
The advanced search feature also allows you to screen unsuitable content, search for image files and look for pages similar to URLs you specify. Go in and experiment with these to find out how they work.
A final wordAs you can see, searching doesn't have to be "hit and miss" nor painful. You don't need to become a specialist researcher, learning each search engine's syntax to format your specialised requests. All that's required at Google (and a number of others, such as Hotbot) is to find their preferences or advanced features pages, fill out a form in plain English and let the search engine do the rest. In any case, the majority of search engines do have "help" pages explaining how their search facility is implemented on their particular site. They're there to be used.
Like any research, the key skill in searching the Internet is to be clear on exactly what it is you're searching for. From there, it's simple. The specialised functions, features and help pages of most search engines can then be used to help you articulate your request and find that key resource, service or contact.
Happy searching.
RESOURCESOther Major Search EnginesAltaVista: www.altavista.comHotBot: www.hotbot.comLook Smart: www.looksmart.comExcite: www.excite.comLycos: www.lycos.comWebCrawler: www.webcrawler.comSearch Engine Lore and Deep Web Searchwww.completeplanet.com/resourcesiteswww.profusion.com(Meta search engine offering some deep web content)
