RESEARCHING ON THE INTERNET

One key to a successful Internet search is an understanding of the many tools available. Certain tools are more suitable for some purposes than others. When searching online, there are two basic tools that you can use for finding information: search engines and subject directories. You use a search engine to search for keywords. You use a subject directory to find specialized topics. The primary difference between these two search tools is that people assemble directories and search engines are automated.

SEARCH ENGINES: A search engine is a software program. All of the hundreds of search engines on the Internet support keyword searches. This is not necessarily the best way to search, but it is the most commonly used by people.

Some search engines use concept-based searching. The search engine tries to determine what you mean and returns hits on Web sites that relate to the keywords. Hits are the number of returns or Web sites based on your keywords. For example, if you search for “video games”, the search engine may return hits on sites that contain Nintendo and Playstation. Excite is one of the best known search engines using concept-based searching.

Another feature used is called stemming. When you search for a word, the search engine also includes the “stem” of the word. For example, when you enter the search word “play”, you may also get back results for plays, playing, and player.

KEYWORD SEARCHES: Keyword searches let you search for keywords within a Web document. When you use a keyword search, you may find that the number of hits you receive are in the thousands or even millions. Each hit is linked to the URL, which is the Web site address. This can be a little overwhelming.

If you examine the Web page a little more closely, you will find that each hit as a relevance rating percentage assigned, beginning with 100%. As you move down your list of hits, the relevance number becomes less. This indicates that the site does not contain all of the search words or contains only one or two instances of the keywords you used.

SEARCH ENGINE / URL (WEB ADDRESS)
Lycos /
Yahoo! /
AltaVista /
Google /
Infoseek /
Excite /
WebCrawler /
AlltheWeb /

SPECIALTY SEARCH ENGINES: These are sometimes called category-oriented search tools and they generally focus on a particular topic. TIP: Some search engines automatically include plurals; others do not. To be on the safe side, include the plural form of keywords you are searching for.

SPECIALTY SEARCH ENGINES
Search Category / Site Name / URL (Web Address)
Finding people / Switchboard Web /
Yahoo /
PeopleSite /
Yellow Pages /
Shareware games / Shareware Web /
Online shopping / Catalog City /
Bottom Dollar /
Sports information / Sports Search /
Career information / CareerPath /
Arthur’s Job Base /
Monster Job Bank /
Career Resource Center /
Education purposes / WWW Virtual Library /
Misc. : Link to over
3,000 specialty search
engines (an index) / Beaucoup Web /
Maps & travel information / Microsoft /
MapQuest /
Hotel Lodging Rooms /

MULTIMEDIA SEARCH ENGINES: If you are interested in finding graphics, video clips, animation, and even MP3 music files, then a multimedia search engine is probably the best way to go. MP3 is a file format that allows audio compression at near-CD quality.

MULTIMEDIA SEARCH ENGINES
Search Category / Site Name / URL (Web Address)
Music & MP3 / Lycos / mp3.lycos.com/


Fine art & photography / Corbis /
Images, audio, & video / AltaVista /
Picture, photographs, & artwork / Ditto /

SUBJECT DIRECTORY SEARCHING: Most subject directories are organized by subject categories, with a collection of links to Internet resources. Remember, subject directories are not automatic, they are assembled by people. Subject directory searches often provide a more guided approach than entering keywords into a search engine. Additional benefits of directories are as follows:

  1. They are easy to use.
  2. You are not searching the entire Web.
  3. The Web sites have been handpicked and evaluated.
  4. Most links include some type of description.
  5. They produce better quality hits on searches for common items.

POPULAR SUBJECT DIRECTORIES
Search Category / Site Name / URL (Web Address)
Educational directory / Encyclopedia Britannica /
Public library information / The Librarian’s Index /
Very large subject directory / Yahoo /
Good annotations / Galaxy /

PHRASE SEARCHING: Use phrase searching when you want to search for words that must appear next to each other. A phrase is entered by using double quotation marks and only matches those words that appear next to each other and in the order in which you specify.

If you want to search for more than one phrase, separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma. For example, if you wanted to search for Micky Mantle baseball cards enter “baseball cards”, “Mickey Mantle”. Capitalize proper nouns.

SEARCH ENGINE MATH: You can use math symbols to enter a formula to filter out unwanted listings. For example:

  1. Put a plus sign (+) before words that must appear (also called an inclusion operator).
  2. Put a minus sign (-) before words that you do not want to appear (also called an exclusion operator).
  3. Words without qualifiers need not appear, but are still involved in sorting your search.

Sample search: You want to make chocolate cookies without coconut. Enter your search this way (+cookie+recipe+chocolate-coconut).

BOOLEAN SEARCHING: Boolean logic is another way that you can search databases for specific information. This is similar to search engine math, but has a little more power. Boolean logic consists of three logical operators:

  1. AND: the more terms you combine with AND, the fewer hits you will receive
  2. NOT: the more terms you combine with NOT, the fewer hits you will receive
  3. OR: the more terms you combine with OR, the more hits you will receive

Sample search: “cookies AND recipes AND chocolate NOT coconut”

“cookies AND recipes OR chocolate”

WILDCARD SEARCHING: The asterisk (*) is considered a wildcard character. Use this when you don’t know the spelling of a word or you want to search plurals or variations of a word. Some search engines only permit the * at the end of the word; with others you can put the * at the end or beginning. Some search engines do not support wildcard searches.

Sample search: You want to search for baseball cards and Nolan Ryan but you are not sure how to spell Nola. (“baseball cards” AND “N* Ryan”).

OTHER SEARCH FEATURES: Another feature provided by several search engines is a related search. These are preprogrammed questions suggested by the search engine that often lead to other Web pages with similar information you are searching for. This can improve your chance of finding useful information. Several search engines use this feature, but they may call it by different names such as, similar pages, related pages, or more pages like this.

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