Surf and Search Online Resources

Question Do you ever go onto the Internet and plan to only spend a small amount of time looking for something and spend much longer than you intended trying to find one thing?

-Problem- Millions of people waste precious time and energy looking for information on the Internet without the proper searching tools to help them be more effective Internet searchers.

Tips for successful Searching Many tools are available to search for online information Search Engines Indexes or directories Metasearch sites Link Lists Shared bookmarks

Indexes Web sites are organized by categories. Some examples of online indexes include: Libdex, which is a worldwide index of library catalogs, libraries, and books Project Gutenberg online books, which contains a listing of over 35,000 free books on the Web The National Geographic index Technical indexes And many more

Metasearch sites A metasearch engine is a search tool that sends user request to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source. Metasearch engines enable users to search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously. Examples of metasearch engines: Webcrawler.com Search.com Infospace.com

Link Lists and Shared Bookmarking Link lists are collections of links organized by topics or categories. A variety of topics on the Web are organized into link list sites. Similarly, shared bookmark sites are usually created as favorite sites that people share with their friends and associates.

Search Engines You will get different results from different search engines because they have different databases. No single tool indexes or organizes the entire Web. When you search for data on the Internet, you are searching a database of information - not the Web. Commonly used search engines: Google Bing Dogpile Ask if the link doesn’t work try clicking on the movie

How to get more out of your search When using a search engine you can refine your search by using: Keywords Phrase searching Search Engine Math Boolean Searching Wildcard Searching

Keyword searches People most often use keyword searches. A keyword search is where you simply type the words you are searching for into the search bar in your engine. Keyword searches return many unrelated results because any page that contains any of the keywords satisfies the searching criteria. If you don’t find relevant results in the first page of results, try refining your search using another method.

Phrase searching Phrase searching refers to grouping words together using quotation marks. Searches for words inside quotation marks will only return pages when those words appear next to each other. For instance, “George Washington” will only give results where “George” and “Washington” appear next to each other instead of any page with “George” or any page with “Washington”. If you are searching for more than one phrase, separate the phrases with a comma: “George Washington”, “Valley Forge”.

Search Engine Math Math symbols can be used to make keywords more specific thereby refining your search results. Insert a (+) symbol before words that should appear on the page Insert a (–) symbol before words that should not appear on the page Suppose you are making a cake and you want a recipe for peanut butter but not chocolate—search for +“peanut butter”+recipe-chocolate+cake This tells the search engine to find a cake recipe that does not contain chocolate but has peanut butter.

Boolean Searching Boolean logic is another way to search, which is similar to search engine math but has a little more power. Boolean logic is based on a simple Yes or No ranking system. Boolean logic consists of three logical operators: AND NOT OR

Boolean Searching The AND operator instructs the search engine to search for all documents containing all words you specify. Sometimes it’s easier to narrow a search by specifying what you are NOT looking for.

So back to our cake recipe example, search for “cake AND recipe”-The more things you combine with AND, the fewer results you will get. So if you want peanut butter cake recipes without chocolate, search for: cake AND recipe AND “peanut butter” NOT chocolate Using OR logic will return more results

Wildcard Searching The symbol * or asterisk can be used as a wildcard character in an Web search. Use the wildcard symbol in place of the letters in words you do not know how to spell. Let’s say you wanted information on Albuquerque, New Mexico, and you didn’t know how to spell it— search for Albu* NM Not all search engines support wildcard characters.

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