Library Research 101

Library Research 101

Advanced Web Search Techniques

Where did I leave my Web tools?

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Sometimes a simple Web search isn't enough to retrieve a useful list of Web links. Some common problems with search results are:

Too many hits, but not enough relevant ones.
Too few hits.
Many duplicate links.
Quality sites mixed with dubious links.
Only certain fields in the Web page should be searched.
Web page should contain graphics files or other media.

To solve these problems, you need to choose a search engine that supports advanced search techniques, or a service that allows you to set criteria for retrieved Web pages.

Too many or too few retrieved hits

While the plus sign and quotation marks approximate Boolean AND and phrase searching, there are times when more precision or flexibility is required.

The tools that give you the most control over searches are, as you learned by searching the library catalog and InfoTrac are:

parentheses
wildcard searching (truncation)
OR, AND, NOT, and NEAR (if available)

In addition, some search engines offer:

specific field searching (title, URL, image)
date restriction
control over results (relevance ranking, etc.)
search within results
the "pipe" symbol ( | ) to search a broad topic, then narrow within results in one search statement. For example, in InfoSeek, you may search for dogs | poodles to search the broad category "dogs," and within results for "dogs," look for "poodles."

This is quite a toolkit, but it's getting complicated enough to need a chart!

Changing your view of results

Search results are usually presented by closest match first. That is, if you entered 3 words in a search, such as hate spice girls, sites containing all 3 words appear at the top of the list. This crude ranking rapidly disintegrates as results with only 2 or 1 of the words follow in random order, often with many duplicates from the same site.

Of the major search services, these offer a measure of control over how results are displayed:

Yahoo! (click search options)
AltaVista
Excite
HotBot
Lycos
Webcrawler

Check the Help files or search tips pages for instructions.

Several search engines categorize search results into folders. To see how helpful this can be, check out:

Northern Light http://www.nlsearch.com/ - a search engine
Inference Find http://www.inference.com/ifind/ - a meta search engine

Reviewed sites

This Web page is proudly among the:

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It is daunting, if not bewildering, to retrieve thousands of results from a simple search. Wouldn't it be nice if we could limit our search to sites that real people have reviewed for content! Parents appreciate some sort of screening of so-called "adult content," and students with limited time want to quickly find well-done sites with good information.

To find reviewed and categorized sites, try these search services:

Lycos Top 5% http://point.lycos.com/categories/ Whenever a Web site displays "top 5% logo," it has received a favorable review from Lycos, one of the oldest and most user-friendly search services.

InfoSeek Channels at http://www.infoseek.com/

Magellan at http://www.mckinley.com/

Channels by Excite at http://www.excite.com/

Argus Clearinghouse at http://www.clearinghouse.net/

The Mining Company at http://www.miningco.com/

Special searches

Little used features of AltaVista and other search engines allow very precise searching within known URL's (Web addresses) or host domains. You can even limit your search to graphics file types. It is even possible to compile a list of Web sites that have links to your home page!

See the comparison chart to see which search services offer these features and the syntax (format) of the search request.