ETT 429Spring 2007

WWW & Searching

Web Searching Strategies

Lecture adopted from Dr. Barbara Fiehn

Strategy Tips

Preplan searches Learn strategies Learn the search engine Use advanced search screens

Search Planning Formulate the research question Identify concepts in the question Identify search terms/describe concepts Consider synonyms and variations of those

terms

Search With Peripheral Vision

Look for more specific terms Collect synonyms, alternative terms Agency or institution or other source? Don’t assume you know what you’re looking for

Strategies for art theft prevention “stolen art” prevention

STOP, Interpol Lyon,other agencies

CoPAT, object-id, other agencies

Key Words

Single Word Finds all occurrences unless an indexing field

is selected

High change of irrelevant hits

Choose key words carefully Uniqueness / Proper nouns

Results in large number of hits Not particularly specific

Phrases If you have two or more words

adjacent in a phrase, se quotation marks to group

Usually get better results than keyword

“violent juveniles”

Boolean Logical operations used to combine search

terms Frequent connectors

AND OR NOT Also

ADJACENT, NEAR and FOLLOWED BY Most search engines require Boolean

terms in all CAPS.

AND

OR

NOT

Plus - Minus Like AND / NOT + sign to require a search term be present - sign to exclude a term from a search

+dogs -pets

Not as commonly used as Boolean

Advanced Searches Wild Card Relevance Ranking Nested Searches Case, Link, Title

Wild Card / Truncation Retrieve variant spellings (eg. color,

colour) Words with a common root (eg.

psychology, psychological, psychologist, psychologists, etc.).

Most common are *, #, and ? Right only truncation (eg. psycholog*), or

middle truncation (eg. colo*r).

Relevance Ranking Algorithm to rank retrieved documents in

order of decreasing relevance. Browse only first few pages of results. Searcher determined "importance", "more

like this“

Whittlebit Google

Relevance Algorithm Number of times the search terms appear

in the document

Location of the search terms in the document (eg. title produces a higher ranking than same word in the body of another document)

Proximity of search terms to one another in a document

Nested Searches (bread +butter) AND (pudding -sandwich) police AND (interview OR biography) journalist AND (international OR foreign) atlas and anatomy AND (color or colour) stonewall NOT (Jackson OR war) Lincoln AND Illinois NOT (abe OR abraham)

Case, Link Use lower case and singular form

Good site? link: and URL to find other pages that have linked to this site Link: whittlebit.com

Limiting search by field single site

site:whitehouse.gov “presidential pets”

web domain

site:org forestry California

“genetically modified organisms” site:edu OR site:gov

Page Title, URL, File Format Force a search only for page titles use

title: and descriptive word title: elephant

file format

filetype:pdf

Language, page updated

Use commands or “Advanced Search”

Finding “expert pages” and searchable databases

Google: genome database “cell biology” directory

Society pages with collections of links Google: genome society

results in “International mammalian genome society”

Choose the Best Search for your Information Need

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html