Search Engines & Effective Searching On The Web

Search Engine vs Database

• Database…The information comes from books, magazines, journals etc. which have gone through a review process.

• Search engines…They find information on the internet. There is not a review process. You make the judgment whether the information is valid and accurate.

Search Engines How do they work?

• Search engines use a “spider” or “robot” to crawl through the WWW to find websites that contain keywords or phrases

How do I begin and effective search?

Identify keywords of your topic

For example :

Katy Tigers

Boolean searching

Use AND to narrow search

Katy AND Tigers

It only return pages that have both words

Boolean Or

Katy OR TigersThis will return pages that have at least one of

these words on the page. This will expand your search.

Boolean NOT -

This tells the search engine to retrieve one keyword but not the other word.

For Example:

Dolphins NOT Miami Dolphins –Miami

Phrase Searching

Surround groups of words with quotation marks to tell the search engine to retrieve documents in which those words appear side by side.

For example : “global warming”

Title searching

This tells the search engine to only return web pages that have the phrase in the title.

Title: “Global warming”

Plural Forms, Capital letters

• Most search engines interpret lowercase as either uppercase or lowercase.

• Limit your results by using uppercase letters.

• Most search engine interpret singular keywords as singular or plural.

• Limit results by using plural forms of words.

Domain Searching

• This will allow you to limit results to certain domains such as websites from the United Kingdom (.uk), educational institutions (.edu) or government sites (gov.)

Current domains in the US

.com = a commercial business

.edu = and educational institution

.gov = a governmental institution

.org = a non-profit organization

.mil = a military site

.net = a network site

Other advanced operators

Site: search only one websiteexample: site:www.katyisd.org

Link

Use this to find linked pages to your website.

link:www.katyisd.org

Information about a page

• Info:www.cancer.org

• If you want to find out more information about the web site.

Synonyms

• If you want information on both your keyword and its synonyms

• ~auto synonyms would be truck, car etc.

Use web sources with caution

Internet sites are created for a variety of reasons• Sell products• Provide services• Advertise • Provide information• To persuade• To share interests and ideas

Remember

Anyone can publish anything on the web and much of that information is inaccurate and biased.

Check out these sites• Museum of Hoaxes http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/

• California Velcro farms http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html

• Tree octopus http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

• Brain protectors http://zapatopi.net/afdb/

• Digital photography http://publish.uwo.ca/~floyd/false/false.htm

• Dog Island http://thedogisland.com