Using Search Engines Efficiently
other Internet workshops
There are over 1 billion Web pages on the Internet. These pages are
neither numbered nor organized. There is no accurate table of contents or index
either. You must learn to use search engines to find your way through
the maze we call the World Wide Web.
Unfortunately, no one search engine is best for all queries (i.e. what
you are searching for). You must learn the strengths of specific search engines
as well as a few different methods for submitting your query to be really successful
and efficient.
There are 3 basic types of search engines:
- SPIDERS: Some search engines like Google,
Alltheweb, Altavista,
Webcrawler and HotBot
are called spiders or robots.
They constantly rove the Web looking for new pages 24 hours a day. Even if
a Web author does not want his or her Web page to be listed on the search
engine, a spider can still find it. Spiders should be used when you are searching
for arcane topics and personal homepages.
- DIRECTORIES: Other search engines like
Yahoo and About.com
are called directories (or indexes) since they
catalogue millions of Web pages by category with descriptions. They often
count on Web page authors to submit their Web page addresses to a catalogue
but many directory search engines employ full-time surfers to find and organize
Web page links. Directories are best to use when searching for company names,
product names, well-known non-profit organizations, country or state-specific
information, celebrities, and trademarks. You should also use a directory
when narrowing down a general topic such as sports, weather, history, jobs,
travel, etc.
- METASEARCH ENGINES: Some search engines like
AskJeeves.com, dogpile.com, Metacrawler
and ProFusion actually search many
search engines at once. You simply type in your request and the search engine
queries many search engines.
Some of the most popular search engines are:
- Yahoo - Yahoo is the probably the most
popular and original directory. It is excellent when you are searching with
simple queries for "official" Web sites and news stories.
- Alltheweb.com - Alltheweb uses
brute force to catalogue Web pages. It claims to have indexed over 300 million
pages. You can even search for certain types
of files such as mp3's (music files) and pictures (jpg's & gif's). It
also uses a very fast method of searching that could save you a few seconds
here and there. If you are looking for something obscure, this is a good
search engine to use.
- Alexa.com - Alexa is powered by Google and owned by Amazon. But it uses some unique interface elements.
- Overture - Overture lists sites
that pay to be in its search engine. Therefore, it argues that you are "guaranteed"
good results when you search. Although, it also includes other non-paying
sites, the Web pages for companies that pay the most will be listed higher
in your search results.
- MSNSearch - MSNSearch is popular because it is used by so many people who
use MSN as their Internet service provider.
- AOLSearch - AOLSearch
is popular because it is used by so many people who use AOL as their Internet
service
provider. AOL uses Google's database so your results when using AOLSearch
probably won't be very different from using Google.
- Google - Google is very good at finding
"official" pages such as corporate home pages. Google claims to
have over 4 billion Web pages in its database. Google finds and catalogues
Web pages by determining how many other Web pages link
to
the
Web
page it catalogues. It does not simply scan pages for numerous occurrences
of a keyword. Because of this unique method, Google will give you fewer
worthless
sites than most search engines. Google is one of the fastest search engines.
You can also use the drill-down technique (see below) to browse its directory.
- Teoma - Teoma
is similar to Google and claims to be more accurate, giving better results.
- Lycos - Lycos has been around for awhile.
It is good for finding graphics and sounds
- Webcrawler - Webcrawler is a spider.
It is pretty good for looking up news stories.
- Hotbot - Hotbot is a spider that is
really good at finding current news stories. It also supports natural-language
queries like AskJeeves.com.
- AltaVista - AltaVista is a spider that
offers foreign-language searching. It also offers a popular foreign-language
translation tool.
- Profusion - Profusino
indexes interactive databases that normally do not appear within standard
search engine databases and indexes. For example, the local weather information
on a local newspaper's Web site often comes from a national weather service
database. This kind of information rarely appears in typical search engines
but would be "found" by InvisibleWeb.com. This search engine is
invaluable for looking up public records, and government and health information.
- iWon - iWon allows
people to win prizes including a $10,000 daily prize and a $1,000,000 monthly
prize. iWon is a pretty large search engines with at least 48 million Web
pages indexes. iWon uses Googles' database of web pages.
- Kartoo - Kartoo clusters
your results and uses an interesting graphical interface.
- Mooter - Mooter
clusters your results using an interesting graphical interface.
- Wisenut - Wisenut gives dependable
results with a very clean interface.
- Allacademic - Allacademic is best
used for academic research.
Searching for People
If you are simply searching for someone's postal address, email address, or
phone number however, it would be better to use a "white pages" directory
such as:
Searching for Advice
Newsgroups (aka discussion or message boards) are great Internet resources
for finding answers to questions. If you are searching for something that could
be located
within a newsgroup, try Google's groups at groups.google.com.
Searching for Advice
You can type whole questions like "Who was the fifteenth president of the U.S.?" at a number of specialized search engines. Some will directly give you the answer while others will be more indirect or promote some commercial sites. These types of reference search engines include:
Searching for Pictures
Try AltaVista ,
WebShots, ditto.com,
and images.google.com.
Searching for Video
Try video.google.com which allows you to search through closed-caption text and still images from selected TV programs. Blinkx.tv uses voice recognition to allow you to search for spoken words from BBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, the History Channel, and other news stations as well as some movie trailers and news radio sources.
Searching for Maps & Driving Directions
There are many search engines that allow you to find an address location
on a map by typing its approximate address. You can even view or print driving
directions to the location from your home. The directions are not always the
quickest or shortest distance but they are usually reliable. Two of the original
and still most popular map search engines are:
Searching for Best Prices
A number of these sites link to sponsored listings and data directly from merchants. Not all sites guarantee the results to be the lowest prices.
Using Google
- Google's Advanced Search page gives you the ability to fine tune your Google
search in many ways.
- with all of the words
- with the exact phrase
- with at least one of the words
- without the words
- File Format
- Date
- Domain
- Products
- Similar
- Links
- You can use a number of "Search
Operators" to enhance your Google
search. No space can be typed between the
colon and the word(s) that you are searching for. Some of them include:
- link:
For example, to search for all of the pages that link to the page www.minich.com,
you would type the query
link:www.minich.com
- define: or definition
For example, to find the definition of the word calculus you would type define:calculus or definition calculus
- stocks:
- site:
- intitle:
- Type double quotes around your phrase if you want Google to find the exact phrase rather than Web pages that contain the words but out of order. For example, searching for the phrase "I, Robot" will only find Web pages that have the title of the book by Isaac Asimov spelled in that exact way with the comma included.
- Type a plus or minus sign in front of a word to make sure that Google includes or excludes a particular word in its results. For example, type +I Robot to make sure that the word I is included in the results. Otherwise, the word I would be ignored since Google ignores common words such as where how, the, and, etc.
Or, you could type bass -fish to search for Web pages about the bass musical instrument rather than the type of fish.
- Use a tilde sign ( ~ ) in front of a word if you want synonyms for the word to also be used in the search. For example, type Van Gogh ~painting to find Web pages that include Van Gogh paintings or Van Gogh art since Google considers the word art to be a synonym for painting.
- Include the word OR in uppercase letters between two words in a search if you want Google to search for either one of them. For example, searching for roses OR flowers will find pages that contain either of those two words.
- Enter an airline flight number (e.g. united 80) and you will see the flight's
status at Travelocity.com and Fboweb.com including maps showing its progress
- Enter an area code and you'll be pointed to a mapquest.com map of the region
that the area code covers
- Enter a U.S. Postal Service package tracking number to see a delivery status
page at the Postal Service's web site
- Enter a car's VIN number and you 'll see a page describing the car's year,
make and model information.
- Type a product's UPC number (without the dashes) to generate a list of
web sites that sell the item or provide information about it.
- Perform a reverse phone number lookup by typing a 10-digit phone number with no hyphens, spaces, or parentheses or in the format (XXX) XXX-XXXX to see
who is listed at that number. If you want your personal information deleted from the Google database used for maps, phone book, and address features, go to www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html
- Type a street address and you will get links to maps from Yahoo Maps and MapQuest with that location. For example, type 630 Evans Avenue Wyomissing PA in order to find a map that contains the Wyomissing Area High School. You can also type the word map in front of a city or state to obtain a map of that city or state as in map Wyomissing PA or just map Reading
- Type a first name, last name, and city to find that person's address and phone number. For example, search for Ronald Weitzel Reading and you will see the phone number and address of the mayor of the Borough of Wyomissing.
- Type a company or mutual fund ticker symbol to get a current quote on a share of stock as in IBM
- By typing "print.google.com" as domain in an advanced Google
search, you can find pages or abstracts of printed books that contain a
specific phrase. You could also perform this search in the basic Google search
query. For example, typing
site:print.google.com "green eggs and ham"
will show all books that have the phrase "green eggs and ham" typed somewhere
in the book.
- Visit news.google.com to search for
news items.
- Visit scholar.google.com to seach through thousands of online books, reviewed papers, and abstracts from academic journals. You can even type the name of a professor.
- Visit froogle.com to search through Google's consumer shopping search engine.
- Search for info specific to your location such as a map of all the bookstores in your zip code at local.google.com.
- Type the town where you live or are planning to visit into the search box at local.google.com to find out what's happening in that area.
- Click the word "Cached" below a link on a Google search results listing
if the site itself doesn't work. You will be viewing the version of the Web
page when it was last viewed by Google and stored in Google's massive database
of Web pages.
- Google will allow you to translate
a few sentences into a foreign language
or even translate a foreign Web page into English.
- You can type calculations directly into Google such as sqrt(100) which would result in the 10 being returned since it is the square root of 100. You can also type 22 * 45 to multiply 22 by 45. See www.google.com/help/calculator.html for other calculator tips.
- You can add a Google toolbar to the top of your Internet Explorer Web browser
window. This saves you the time of having to type in the address "www.google.com".
This safe, free feature can be downloaded from Google's web site and it is
VERY EASY to install it. A number of other popular search engines have a
similar toolbar but I advise picking only one and using it. Otherwise, you
will clutter your Internet Explorer window up with unnecessary toolbars.
- If you mispell a word in a Google search, it sometimes provides a "Did you mean..." suggestion at the top of the results page. I often use this feature to figure out the correct spelling of a word that I can come close to spelling correctly.
- If your search term is relevant to a current news item, you will see a section at the top of the results page labeled "News results for..." with links to news stories. Of course, you can also visit Google's news page at news.google.com to do an exclusive, more thorough search for news items.
- Type "movie: 19610" to find movie listings for the Wyomissing area or "movie: Reading PA" to see movie listings for all movie theatres in the Reading vicinity.
- New kinds of searches are being researched at labs.google.com
all the time.
- If you are a programmer or Web designer, you may be interested in ways that you can tap off of Google's power and free search results. These techniques take advantage of Google's API and are known as Google Hacks. See www.douweosinga.com/projects/googlehacks and hacks.oreilly.com/pub/ht/2 for more info or just search for "Google hacks".
Miscellaneous
- An interesting search engine Metaspy
let's you see what other people are currently searching for. Google
also provides interesting search statistics.
- Search Engine Watch keeps
statistics on the use of many search engines.
Searching for Files on your Computer's Hard Drive
- Google Desktop Search - free, does include secure Web pages (https://...) after initial search and even though you can change your preferences to keep those pages from future searches they are still in the index which is located in a standard hacker-known place on your hard drive
- Copernic Desktop Search - free, doesn't include secure Web pages (https://...)
- X1 - costs less than $100
Search Tutorials
- About.com gives
many tips and recommendations for when to use one search engine over another.
- SearchEngineShowDown also gives great advice on using search
engines.
How to Use a Search Engine:
A/ Wide Open Searching
| To enter a search request simply enter a word or phrase into
the query box. It
looks like a horizontal white area. Press the Enter key or click the
Submit button
to actually enter the request. Obviously, you must be careful to
type your word or phrase correctly. Usually search engines are not case-sensitive,
meaning that typing the word "Bush" (as in the President) is treated the
same way as "bush" (as in shrub).
Most search engines such as Google limit your search to the first 10 words that you entered in the query box. Search engines search for the words in the order that they appear. So a search for "book paper" will be different from a search for "paper book".
Then click the Search button which is usually to the right of the
query box. The Search button may say "Search", "Go",
"Submit", or some other phrase.
|
query box
|
The search engine will "return" a results Web page with a list of
10 - 25 links that point to Web pages that contain one or more of the
words
that you entered as your search request. Each link usually is accompanied
by a short description or excerpt from the actual Web page itself. This
list of link is ranked by relevancy. That is, the first link
is to the Web page that the search engine determines is a close fit to your
request. Perhaps, the word(s) that you had entered is listed more times
on that page than on the pages referred by the lower ranked links.
To see more relevant Web pages than the initial screen of 10 - 25 links, look
at the bottom of the results page to see links to pages 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 and so
on.
In many search engines such as Google, you can use double quotes around your
search phrase to obtain more exact results. Also, using Google, you can use
an asterisk as a wild card operator to replace entire words (not word stems
like other search engines!)
Links to advertisers who pay to have their products promoted on a search results
page usually appear in the right margin of a search results page. They also
appear as banners (narrow, flashy rectangles at the top of a page) and mixed
in between other links.
B/ Drill-Down Technique
Often, one can find the information desired by using, what I
call, the drill-down technique.
Visit a popular search index such as Yahoo
or Google's Directory at directory.google.com.
Then, click one of the blue, underlined, subtopic links that are presented
below the query box simply. Continue to drill to
more specific subtopics by choosing from the resulting sets of subtopic
links. Often,
this method works extremely well when you are searching for commercial, professional,
reference, and academic information rather than far-out topics. See this
reference for information on how several directories are created.
C/ Guessing the URL Web Page Address
(without using a search engine)
Often you can find a company or other organization's home page
by simply typing an address directly into a Web browser. Try typing an address
starting with "www.", followed by the name of the company and then
".com". When you press the Enter key, you may get lucky and see the
company's Web page. Try other version's of the company, organization, or product's
name, if your first guess doesn't work. You can also try a different extension
other than .com. See this
list for other extensions.
D/ Special Kinds of Searches
You can search for a word or phrase within a web page by using
your Web browser program's Edit/Find (on This Page)... menu
command. The Web browser will highlight each occurrence of the word within
the Web page that you are currently viewing.
E/ Searching within One Company's Web Site
You can also search for a word or phrase within a particular
web site if it offers a search feature. For example, visit www.ford.com and
type "Taurus" in the white Search box and click the Search button next
to it. This search will return the Web pages within the Ford web site that contain
the word "Taurus".
This technique can also be used by performing an "Advanced Search"
with many search engines. For example, go to Google's
Advanced Search page and type your search term in the area marked "Domains"
or tying the Google search operator "site:" at the beginning of your search
entry.
F/ More Advanced Techniques
Most search engines offer a basic search page and an
advanced search page. The basic search page usually contains an uncluttered
interface with just one search query box and a search button to click. The
advanced search page allows better, more fine-tuned searching methods. See
the following examples of basic vs. advanced search pages.
Search Engine |
|
| Google |
|
|
| Yahoo |
|
|
| AlltheWeb |
|
|
You can also use certain symbols to perform an advanced search from within
a basic search page query box. Double quotes, Boolean operators (e.g. AND,
OR, NOT), plus and minus symbols (+ and -), and asterisks ( * ) can be used
to refine a search. See Ian's Search Tutorial for
a lesson on using these symbols. Google explains how some of these symbols can
be used at this help
page.