1. Search Engines By Wanda Dansby CECS 5030 Dr. Knezek

2. Search Engines u 2 Major Tools for Locating Information on the Web Search Engines Subject Trees u Additional Options Meta Search Engines All-in-One Pages

3. Search Engines u Dozens of search engines: including Alta Vista, InfoSeek, HotBot, WebCrawler, etc... u Not all search engines support the same search options. u Incapable of finding the best possible document u Designed to return many possible documents A document returned in response to a query is called a hit.

4. Guidelines for Searches u 5 - 10 keywords are better than 1 or 2 u Names of specific people or places help narrow the search u Enter keywords in lower case unless Proper Name u Capitalize first letter of proper names u Include name or organization that might post info u Use specific nouns relevant to topic u Include alternative spellings or abbreviations u Play around with variations on your query

5. Subject Trees u Also called directories u A hierarchically organized collection of categories and subcategories u Browsing aids designed to get you where you want to go u Yahoo - probably most popular

6. Guidelines u Always start at the root of the tree and branch out u A good subject tree will make it easy for you to get where you are going u Advantage: Subject Trees only index documents that have been checked by reviews and accepted as legitimate sources of info

7. Meta Search Engines u Send queries simultaneously to multiple web search engines and/or web directories u Leverage your time & reduce effort u Do not conduct exhaustive searches

8. Examples of Meta Search Engines u Dogpile u Ask Jeeves u Cyber411 u Highway 61 u Internet Find u MetaCrawler u MetaFind

9. All-in-One Pages u Allows you to retain complete control over your queries while minimizing the tedium of visiting a list of different search engines.

10. Summary u Major Tools u Additional Options u Sources: Lehnert, Wendy G. (1998). Internet 101: A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet and the World Wide Web. (pp. 158 - 270). Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc... Liu, Jian. (May 1998). Guide to Meta-Search Engines [On-line]. Available: http://www.indiana.edu/~librcse/search/meta.html Webster, Kathleen & Paul, Kathryn. (Jan 1996). Beyond Surfing: Tools and Techniques for Searching the Web [11 pages]. Information Technology [On-line]. Available: http://magi.com/~mmelick/it96jan.htm