Module 3

Introduction
The World Wide Web is a subset of the Internet, linking the information world with
hypertext. The Web is currently the service that most people use to access Internet
resources and services. Because the Web is not indexed in any standard way, finding
relevant information often seems an impossible task. There are several basic types of
search tools that may be used to locate web resources: search engines, meta-search
engines, metasites, and directories. The following chart details the differences between
these search tools and provides examples of when to use each.

Internet Search Tools

Search Engines Meta-Search Engines Metasites Directories

Database generated Searches multiple databases
by computer generated by other search Compiled by humans Compiled by humans
program engines
Coverage limited to
Index a large
Search databases compiled by specific subject or file
percentage of web Limited coverage
general search engines format, may index the
resources
"deep web"
Allow browsing by subject, often
Use keywords for Use keywords, but search Use keywords for precise provide a search feature, which
precise searches precision is sacrificed searches searches the directory's limited
database
Use for specific, Use if you have a specific Use for specific, focused Use for general searches, broad
focused searches, term or want to see a sample searches on a particular topics, when you want the best
narrow topics of what's available on a topic topic quality sites

Since the ever-changing nature of the Web provides access to vast numbers of
information resources, web sites and documents appear, are deleted, or are moved to a
different location each day. In this dynamic environment, search engines can be the
most efficient way of locating information on a specific topic since they provide access
to immense, continuously updated databases of Internet resources. There are hundreds
of search engines designed to help you find information, whether you are looking for a
topic of personal interest, or material for a scholarly research project.
Using search engines effectively may seem intimidating since new search engines
appear frequently and existing engines often change their search interface and format.
Though there is at present no consistent standard that governs search engines, they do
share many basic features that allow the searcher to retrieve relevant information.

Free Resources Available Via the Web

The number and type of resources available through the Internet increases daily. The
following types of information are usually free to any Internet user:

● Current events from newspapers, current issues of magazines, and news wire
feeds
● Corporate information, including annual reports, product information, and stock
quotes
● Government information such as current laws, regulations, court decisions, and
information from local, state, and federal government departments and agencies
● Ready reference material, including dictionaries, some encyclopedias, statistical
sources and other quick answer sources, such as:
○ Encyclopedia Britannica
○ Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
○ Statistical Abstract of the United States
○ Occupational Outlook Handbook
● Bibliographic information from library OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogs).
Books and other materials located in remote catalogs can often be borrowed from a
local library via interlibrary loan.
● Bibliographic information from various disciplines, including:
○ PubMed, which offers bibliographic references and abstracts to articles
from over 4,800 biomedical periodicals.
● Texts of books in the public domain (generally books published more than 75
years ago, which are not protected by copyright laws) from sites such as:
○ Project Gutenberg, the oldest producer of free electronic books, currently
offering more than 18,000 texts.
○ The Camelot Project, which offers public domain literature relating to the
Arthurian legends.
● Material on popular culture, such as cinema, television, and sports such as:
○ The Internet Movie Database, which provides information on movies,
producers, and actors.
● An increasing number of websites from colleges, universities, and associations,
which post information ranging from student research papers to scholarly works
by professors and others who are experts in their subject fields
● Postings to discussion groups, asking or answering specific questions on a
particular topic

Articles from some current issues of popular and scholarly journals may be found
through searchable databases such as Google Scholar and FindArticles.com. In
addition, there are many electronic journals freely available via the Web. However, most
academic research will require access to journal articles that are only available through
library subscription databases.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Most search engines use a computer program called a "spider" to collect information
and index web resources. Sometimes called "webcrawlers" or "robots", these computer
programs crawl through websites on the Internet, gathering information from all the
pages of a website. The spider returns the information to a central database and then
indexes the information it has gathered. When you use a search engine, you are
searching the database compiled and indexed by the spider.

While all search engines rely on spiders to collect and index information, each performs
its tasks in a slightly different way. Each search engine has its own search interface and
uses different criteria for matching searches with documents. Each may also differ in
terms of search speed and how it ranks results in order of relevance.

Searching would be easier if the search engines used a common standard. However,
each search engine operates a little differently, and each search engine database
contains a large number of unique documents, with limited overlap. Therefore, it is a
good idea to search using more than one search engine to be sure you have retrieved
most of the relevant information available on your topic.

Relevancy and Search Terms

A search is performed by submitting keywords in the search box. The search engine
compiles a list of websites that contain these terms. The order of these sites is often
determined by relevancy (i.e., how closely the site matches the query). Search engines
look at the location and frequency of occurrence of search term to help determine
relevancy. The higher up on a website a search term appears, the higher the ranking of
that website. A website that contains a search term in the title or in the first few
paragraphs of text will be determined to be more relevant than one in which the search
term appears toward the end of the document. Search engines also look at the number
of times search terms appear in the text of the website. Sites with a higher frequency of
a search term are determined to be more relevant. Google even looks at font size and
boldness to help determine relevancy.

Ranking and Popularity

In addition to text-matching techniques, an increasing number of search engines are
using popularity and link analysis as a means of ranking search results.

Google uses PageRank technology o rank the usefulness of a website. Google

interprets a link from website A to website B as a vote by site A for site B. The more
votes or links a site receives, the more relevant the site is. In addition to looking at the
number of links a site receives, Google also analyzes the sites casting the votes. Votes
cast by sites which are themselves major sites, like CNN for example, are weighed
more heavily than votes from other less popular sites. Link analysis is comparable to the
time-honored tradition of researchers rating the importance of a study or article by the
number of times it is cited elsewhere.

Sponsored Links
Most major search engines accept paid listings. Some search engines sell commercial
spots on the results list so that the buyer's page is near the top as if it was one of the
best results according to a link analysis. In the best search engines, sponsored links or
paid listings are clearly labeled, kept separate from search results, but are relevant to
the search.

Size
When search engine producers refer to their size, they are usually counting unique
URLs as opposed to unique sites, which may contain a number of URLs. The search
engine with the largest collection of sites is not necessarily the best search engine, but,
potentially, the larger the search engine the greater the chance that you will find
something.

General Search Features

Most of the major search engines support the following search techniques, although
each search engine operates a little differently. To find out which features are supported
by a search engine, read the help page. There is usually a link to a help page near the
search box or near the top of the search engine's home page. If it is not in one of these
places, try selecting the search engine's Advanced Search option.

Just like other Internet resources, search engines often change their appearance and
features with little or no notice.

Bottom Line: If you are not certain which techniques the search engine uses or if
your search statement does not work, reread the help page.

Case Sensitivity
Some search engines are case sensitive, requiring that proper names and place names
be capitalized. In general, when a search statement is entered in all lower case, both
lowercase and uppercase will be retrieved. The reverse is not true. When uppercase is
used, the search engine will only retrieve the exact match. For example, AIDS will not
retrieve the common word, aids.

Boolean Operators
Most search engines support Boolean searching, allowing AND, OR, and NOT
searches. Some search engines require that the Boolean operator be capitalized; others
do not, although those not requiring capitalization accept it. Therefore, it is a good idea
to capitalize any Boolean operator. See also Lesson 2E on Boolean searching.

Many search engines use a simplified form of Boolean operator, replacing the operator
with a symbol:
 ● the + sign for an AND search
Example: +drinking +driving searches for the words drinking AND driving, in no
specific order in the text of the web page.
● the - sign for a NOT search
Example: +dolphins -football will search for documents which contain the word
dolphins but NOT the word football

Google defaults to an AND search (automatically placing an AND between terms), and
uses a - sign to indicate NOT. This means that you do not have to type AND in your
Google search statements. However, for explanatory purposes, in this course the AND
operator will be included in search examples, and for class exercises you should include
this operator in your search statements where applicable.

Nesting
Search statements combining more than one type of Boolean operator must also use
parentheses around synonymous terms. This technique is called nesting. The
parentheses tell the search engine to perform that search first. For example, suicide
AND (teen OR youth OR adolescent) will search for documents containing any or all
of the terms within the parentheses before combining that result with the word suicide.

Phrase Searching and Truncation

Most search engines support the use of quotation marks around words, terms or names
you want searched as a phrase, i.e., appearing in exactly the order you enter them. For
example, "ozone layer depletion" searches for this exact phrase with the words in the
order given.

When devising a phrase search, be sure to evaluate the likelihood of your phrase being
used by others. For instance, if you were doing a search on the benefits of reading to
children, "reading children" would not return results as well as "reading to children."
Phrase searching is the one time you may use minor words like of, in, to, etc.

Some search engines automatically look for singular and plural forms of terms as well
as -ing or -ed endings. Others use the asterisk (*) to specify that all endings of the root
term be searched. This technique is called truncation.

Field Searching
Some search engines allow you to limit your search to specified fields, such as the title
of the document, a word from the URL, the domain name, the type of file, and the
availability of such features as images, sound, and video. In the following table, four
types of field searching are demonstrated (title, URL, domain, and file type) in addition
to phrase searching and truncation. All of these syntaxes will work in Google except for
the truncation symbol (Google now uses stemming technology to automatically truncate
for you).
 Title of Goal Common Example Searches Syntax for
Strategy Syntax Examples
Phrase To limit search to an " " You're looking for the phrase "health care
Searching exact phrase (i.e. health care reform. reform"
words together in
order)
Truncation To find plurals or * You want to find any of the clon*
variations of a root following terms: clones,
word (truncation) cloned, cloning, etc.
Title To specify that your intitle: You're looking for sites that intitle:"tomb
Searching search term should have tomb raider in their raider"
be found in the title of Web page titles.
the Web page
URL To specify that your inurl: You're looking for sites that inurl:nasa
Searching search term should have NASA in their urls.
be found in the URL
of the Web page,
including paths and
subdirectories
Domain To limit your results site: 1) you only want 1) site:edu
Searching to a particular domain educational sites (i.e.
or site the domain is .edu). 2)
2) you only want to site:loc.gov
search within the
Library of Congress's
website
(http://www.loc.gov).
File Type To limit results to a filetype: you only want Microsoft filetype:doc
Searching particular type of Word documents
document (i.e., Word
document, Excel
spreadsheet, PDF,
etc.)

Creating Effective Search Statements

The next table demonstrates how these techniques can be combined to create effective
search statements.

Search Query Search Techniques Search Statement

You want government sites that domain searching bioterrorism site:gov
discuss bioterrorism
A friend told you about a great site URL searching, title elephants inurl:wildlife
on elephants that had wildlife in the searching intitle:africa
URL and Africa in the Web page
title
You need an Excel document with Boolean operator, statistics AND
statistics on international adoption phrase searching, file "international adoption"
type searching filetype:xls
You are looking for sites that relate nesting, Boolean (ADHD OR "attention
to children who have ADHD operators, phrase deficit hyperactivity
searching, truncation disorder") AND child*

These are just a select sample of search techniques commonly available for search
engines. For additional search features, read the help page of the search engine you
are using.

Advanced Search
Many search engines offer an advanced search mode. In advanced search, you are
able to perform many search techniques by utilizing designated pull-down menus
instead of correct syntax to limit your search. Since syntax will vary between search
engines, using advanced search often saves time and frustration. However, keep in
mind that not all search techniques will be available in advanced search. The following
graphic shows Google's Advanced Search Screen:
Notice that the form allows you to use Boolean Operators as follows:
AND = all these words
OR = one or more of these words
NOT = any of these unwanted terms

Also, "this exact word or phrase" is equivalent to using quotation marks to designate a
phrase.

For more information on Google's Advanced Search features, check out the Advanced
Search Help Guide.

Be sure to check out the advanced search options of your favorite search engines.

Comparison of Major Search Engines

Some of the most popular search engines are listed below, along with links to their help
files. Some search engines, such as Ask.com and Wolfram Alpha, work to provide you
the answer to your search without having to go to a third party site. Google is also
incorporating this feature into their search engine by providing the answer to common
questions at the top of their search results.

Major Search Engines

Ask.com Ask.com Help
Bing Bing Help
Google Google Help
Yahoo! Search Yahoo! Search Help

Spotlight on Google
According to comScore, a "digital marketing source" in November of 2015, Google
conducted 63.9% of all online searches in the U.S. (Microsoft was the next busiest
search engine with 20.9% of searches). Google's size, uncluttered interface, and fast
searching have made it easily the most popular search engine. The following are
examples of additional features that make Google stand apart:

 Google Images provides access to more than billions of images

 Google News provides access to nearly 10,000 worldwide news sources
 Google Translate provides translation services for text selections or entire Web
pages
 Google Scholar indexes scholarly information including peer-reviewed articles,
theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports
Note: Some full-text results retrieved by Google Scholar will only be available for
a fee
For the full selection of Google features, click the box icon link at the top of the general
screen, or above your results on your search screen:

Meta-Search Engines
A special kind of search engine, called a meta-search engine, allows you to query
several search engines at once. Instead of doing a search itself, a meta-search engine
sends your request to other search engines, compiles the results, and displays them for
you. This process can be much faster than querying several search engines separately.

Meta-search engines do not own a database of web pages—they use and deliver
results from the databases and search programs of each of the individual search
engines they query. Meta-search engines act as an intelligent middleman to pass your
search through, gathering the responses and then giving you a report from several
engines at once. As well as saving time, this kind of search engine can give you an
overview of the kind of document you may find using your search terms and may even
result in giving you exactly what you need if you are searching for a unique term or
phrase.

There are some disadvantages in relying exclusively on meta-search engines. None of

the meta-search engines query all of the largest search engines. If a search connection
takes too long, one or more of the search engines may time out and produce no results.
If you submit a complicated search to a meta-search engine that one of the queried
tools does not "understand," you may get no hits at all from that engine. However, you
will usually get results from another tool that supports your search strategy.

Meta-search engines retrieve only the first 10-50 hits from each search engine; the total
number of hits may be less than you would retrieve with a direct search on a single
search engine. Thus, meta-search engines do not eliminate the need to learn how to
intelligently search at least one or more general web search engines.

Each meta-search engine has its own interface and method for letting you choose
engines to search, so it is important to consult the "Help" pages for each meta-search
engine.
Links to Major Meta-Search Engines
Some of the most popular meta-search engines are listed below, along with links to their
help pages:

Meta-Search Engines
Dogpile Dogpile FAQs
Info.com Info.com’s How to Get a Better Search
Result
Yippy Yippy FAQs

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Copyright © 1997-2015 Florida College System, Council on Instructional Affairs,
Learning Resources Standing Committee. Last revised June 2014 by the LIS 2004 Course Revision Committee.