Advanced Tutorial for Searching the Web

An Advanced Tutorial for Searching the Web

Five popular search engines, Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), Infoseek (www.infoseek.com), Lycos (www.lycos.com), WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com), and Excite (www.excite.com) are compared here.

Common Principles and Features of Search Engines

The user types in a search term or phrase, clicks a button or presses <Enter>, and views a list of search results.
The list of search results is sorted by relevancy according to a program built into the particular search engine.
There are a number of ways that a student can narrow his search by following syntax rules when inputing the search term(s). Chech this tutorial to see which search engines support which of the following operators.
- capitalization - It is best to capitalize proper nouns.
- double quotes - They can be used to specify words which must be located together in a phrase.
- + and - symbols - The plus symbol requires a word to be on the resulting Web pages.
- Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT - These words will narrow your results a great deal.
- parentheses - Should be used with Boolean operators since AND has a higher precedence than OR.
The syntax rules are usually explained in two places (example). There is a general hints page linked to a search engine's search page, which explains basic, elementary ways that one can perform more successful searches. There is also an advanced strategy page, which explains more complicated syntax rules as well as strategies that can be used in one's searching. Learn more about specific search engines by reading the tutorials that they provide!
There are display options that can be adjusted in order to see the results more clearly on the resulting screen and to see more detailed listings.

Differences between Five Popular Search Engines
(Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Lycos)

Excite allows the student to search for concepts, as well as simple terms using "Intelligent Concept Extraction".
Excite contains a "More Like This Link" link associated with found links to give the student an idea of other web pages which may be related to the ones which met the searching criteria.
Excite allows one to "Sort by Site", which can help narrow one's focus greatly during a search.
Yahoo has a display option that allows the student to first specify the time which a page was linked to the Yahoo database.
Infoseek allows the use of commas to delimit separate terms or phrases within the same search.
Infoseek uses the pipe ( | ) to search within a certain set of results using "Ultrasmart".
WebCrawler displays an interactive city map , if the search term(s) includes a city name (22,000 cities are possible).
Lycos allows the student to search for pictures and sounds.
Lycos uses a period (.) to restrict search results in a unique way.
Lycos uses the dollar sign, $, and Yahoo uses the asterisk, *, as a wildcard symbol in search terms.
WebCrawler uses the words, NEAR and ADJ, to modify broaden searches.

Advanced Searching

Title, Site, and URL Address Matches

Search "Backwards"

Sometimes, it is a good idea to "search backwards". This can be done by typing,

"link: www.whitehouse.gov" into AltaVista

(details).

Although, it may be a better idea to type

"+link: www.whitehouse.gov -url: www.whitehouse.gov"

to prevent internal links from appearing in the search results.

Translating URL Web page addresses into foreign languages

Visit AltaVista's Translation helper at babelfish.altavista.digital.com to translate English into a number of other languages and vice versa before proceeding with your search. In this way you can search foreign Web pages.

After you have studied the tutorial above, you may take a quiz. Good Luck!

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