Searching the World Wide Web Information and charts in this workshop are from pandia.com Logos were taken from various web pages for illustration purposes.

How do you find the information you want? Browse and hope? Hunt and waste time? Search haphazardly? Wander and wonder? Stumble upon? Get lucky? Ask for help? Pray?

Tools for Finding Information Search Engines Directories Libraries Online Encyclopedias Wikipedia

Techniques for Finding Information Patience Utilize Search Engines Directories Library Resources Use Key Search Words –Refine Search –Boolean

Search Directories Search directories – Yahoo is the most well known. –hierarchical databases with references to websites. The websites that are selected by people/organizations and classified by that search service. –Directories are useful for general well known.

Pandia Power Search Has an Open directory –A catalogue compiled by people worldwide –General Categories with hierarchy You are searching the text contained in the site title and the description of the site search the words contained in the category titles or descriptions may add information from search engines if no matches are found

Search Engines Search engines crawl the Web looking for new web pages. These engines scan the web pages and put the it into a large accessible database. No search engine covers the whole Net; it is best to utilize multiple search engines for a thorough search of the web UShttp:// US

Metasearch Engines These search engines search several engines and directories at the same time. –Extracts the most relevant information

What are the best Metaengines?

News Search The Pandia Newsfinder

Now that you know which engine to use….refine your search Be specific Use key words Use Booleans Most search engines interpret the space between words as AND. Some engines interpret the space between the words as OR. Boolean searching is supported by most of the major search engines. Pages including the words following AND NOT will not be listed.

Phrases Use double quotation marks: "...", like this: “red apples" AND “green apples" AND “yellow apples" This will tell the search engine to look for pages that include the two word text string and not the single word such as ‘red’

Searches Utilizing Proximity When there is a sequence of words that are normally connected, but that may be displayed or listed in another way, such as Janet Jean King Janet J. King You may use the NEAR search operator. –NEAR means "show me pages where these words are near each other". Janet near/3 King –finds documents in which Janet and King occur within three words of each other, in either order." –By altering the number, you decide the distance between keywords –.

Case Sensitivity Some search engines and directories are partially case sensitive. –lower case letters typed in the search box will match both upper and lower case letters on the webpage Janet King or janet king With the use of capital letters in "Bill Brown", your search will not include pages with the words bill (meaning invoice) and brown (meaning color).

Parentheses and Wildcards (“red apples" AND pie) OR (yellow apples AND cake) Parentheses help to clarify the search hot* This wildcard asterisk will give you search results including –Hot, hotter, hotel, hotels, etc.

~Tilde Google’s "tilde"-operator allows you to search for synonyms. –Place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of a keyword –Google will replace your keyword with other similar words therefore enlarging your search.

If Boolean is too difficult – just use Math! +red +apple+yellow-Jonathan-pie Place a + sign in front of words that must be included on the webpage. Place a - sign in front of a word to subtract pages that contain that particular word.

Field searching Title magazine AND title:gardening. URL “red apples" AND url:pandia.com/goalgetter Domain Spitfire AND car AND domain:.uk (.com) and (.net) US educational (.edu) US governmental (.gov) US military (.mil)

If you Get an Error Code Delete the last part of the address until you come to the next "/". This will enable you to go to the main index of the webpage The main webpage or index in most directories is named index.html Yahoo! has more information on error codes:

Addresses on the Internet