Searching the Web Requires Devising a Strategy

Originally printed

(updated 4/02)

Joyce Kasman Valenza

We told. you so.

For years, librarians have been proclaiming that search strategy is an essential life skill. And now, with millions of Web pages out there, people are starting to believe.

We still have a lot to learn. Every day I watch students and teachers who claim they "know the Internet" plug a couple of words into a search engine and expect to get good results.

Such superficial searchingmay work with a small library catalog or a self-contained CD-ROM database. If you try a few times, you'll usually find something of value.

But out on the Web, without a strategy, it is likely you'll be drowning in thousands of irrelevant results.

Searching is an art. For example, the help page for the search engine, HotBot explains that successful expert-level searching "is a dance between targetting your search precisely enough, but not too narrowly, so that you get all the results you are looking for."

Search engines are not particularly creative or clever; they don't generally "catch your drift." What they do is send their robots or spiders across the Web, looking for exactly the terms you ask them to look for--character by character.

So if you are looking for information on the human heart, and use as search terms human heart, you may not pick up results that use the synonym cardiac unless you use that term as well.

Likewise, the search term human heart wil also deliver treatises on broken hearts and hearts of gold.

After your terms are searched, the engines generate a list of results, or hits, for you to examine. There are likely to be lots of irrelevant documents. Hits are frequently displayed 10 or 20 to a page, but without good strategy the best results are as likely to appear on the 10th or 300th page as on the first where you are not likely to see them. Good searchers can move the best up to page one or two where they are likely to be seen.

Look for search engines that help you bring the best results to the top of result lists. Google, Teoma, WiseNut, Vivisimo, Oingo, and Direct Hit, have smart features, like subject clustering or thesauri or special revelance ranking features that are more likely to bring the good stuff up.

The major search engines also vary in the size of their databases, how frequently they update, how they expect you to express your search, how they determine relevance, and the search options they offer. For this reason a student performing the same search in several search tools may produce dramatically different results in each.

For the best results, check the help or tips areas of each search tool, to determine its rules for searching, or its syntax. Teachers may want to print the tip pages for the search tools their students use most and keep them displayed near the computers. This will help students with such issues as whether to use AND or + to ensure that all search terms are included in each result.

If you are not happy with your results, try another search engine, check your spelling, try synonyms or related words, broader or narrower terms. Mine the results on your list for promising terms you never thought of. And by all means, use strategy!

Boolean Operators: Fine tune your search using the terms AND (+), OR, or NOT (-). AND limits your search, requiring that all words or terms you enter appear in results. OR is used to capture synonyms or related words (car OR automobile). NOT eliminates possibilities you suspect might cause problems (Nirvana NOT music NOT rock).

Some search engines require that these Boolean operators be typed in capital letters, so it might be a good idea to develop that habit. Most often the symbols + and - may be used instead. Use these symbols immediately before or after words, leaving no spaces (python -monty will be a quicker way to find material about that particular snake).

Wildcards: Often and asterisk (*) may be used to stand for any string of characters. Used as a suffix, teen* would pick up teenage, teenagers, or teens. The asterisk may also be used as a prefix, perhaps to pick up those *gry words like angry and hungry. Sometimes the question mark is used to pick up variations when they occur in the middle of a word--for instance, wom?n.

These operators are especially useful when you are unsure of spelling (Herz* for Herzegovina).

Phrases: Often you will want words to appear together and in specific order. Commonly, quotation marks set words offer as phrases to be searches as a whole. This strategy is especially helpful for names and titles ("martin luther king", "raisin in the sun")

Proximity: Words are not always meaningful unless they appear near each other in a document. Some engines will allow you to type the operator NEAR to specify that words appear close to each other, but in no particular order (NEAR/25 would look for words within 25 words apart.) The operator ADJ may be used to specify that two words appear next to each other (global ADJ warming). You will most often find this feature in an advanced search area.

Field Searching: When offered, this can be a powerful tool. Field searching restricts searches to certain portions of Web documents. This feature allows users to specify that the words they are searching for appear in the title, the URL, or the first paragraph of text.

Case Sensitivity: Many search engines are case insensitive. They ignore capitalization patterns and retrieve both upper- and lowercase variations. A few search engines are case sensitive. They pay close attention to case patterns. Baker would pick up the name and not the bread preparer; AIDS would pick up the disease and ignore references to helpers. Unless you have good reason to use capitals, it is best to get into the habit of using only lowercase letters.

Nesting: By combining your logical operators in parenthesis (remember algebra?) you can perform a number of tasks at once. An example: jaguar AND (car OR automobile)

If you are still confused, remember you can always ask a librarian for help!

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