Search Guide

SEARCH GUIDE

1. Introduction

There are different types of search instruments on the internet, search engines are the most popular though. Search engines are websites where you can search information (available at other sites). These are databases with references to web pages, news items, FTP-documents, and so on. In this way you can kind of compare a search engine with a library, but with the difference that a library catalog contains all the documents that are in the library, while a search engine only deals with a part of the internet, 40 % to be exact.

Search engines can – based on how the information is indexed ( gathered and ordered) – be divided in ‘directories’ and ’search engines’ . Beside this, I will also talk about ’search robots’ and ‘meta-search engines’.

2. Search engines

I am not going to elaborate on this, everybody knows the popular engines like Google,Yahoo, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, and many more. I will discuss how to search later.

3. Directories

In directories, like Google Directory, Yahoo! Search, Looksmart, and so on, the indexing (the creating of the catalog) is done by people (editors). Websites are examined, criticized, and put in categories. The user can consult a directory in two ways : by going downwards in the directory structure, or by just searching websites/categories with a keyword.

For example, if someone wants to build a website but does not know how to start, he could go into, for example, Yahoo’s directory. At the highest level, he would be in category ‘computers and internet’, from here he could go to subcategory ‘World Wide Web’, and then some subtopics like ‘CGI Scripting’, ‘HTML’, ‘Page Design’ etc.

Directories are very useful if you want to find relevant websites in a short time. Ideal for exploring a subject. There are not many resources, but they are all qualitative well, just because they are selected by an editor. You also have directories that are specialized in 1 subject, where the quality is even higher. Another way for exploring a domain is by using webrings, meta pages or online encyclopedias.

4. Search Robots

Search robots, like Google,Alltheweb are special indexing programs, called bots, spiders or crawlers, who do the indexing. These sniff around on the internet, constantly searching for new or updated websites. Search engines are easier when you just want to do a fast search. It is also useful when the user has a specific information question like ‘the birthday of Einstein’. A search robot indexes all relevant keywords from the website and saves these in 1 index. When a user searches this keyword, are all the pages reflected in the search results where this keyword occurs.

5. Meta search

As I already said, you have to bear in mind that the search engine only deals with 40% of the internet. Directories deal with only 10%. In some cases, is it necessary to consult as many sources as you can. So you will possibly search with the same keywords on different site. This is when the meta search come in handy, as it search in several search engines. Popular meta searchers are Search, Metacrawler and Museseek.

6. How to search

Because there is so much information on the internet, it is really important you use the right method, and especially the right keywords.

6.1 Keywords

You have to use a keyword that is specific enough, but yet not too specific. If you need information about a grizzly bear you would better search on ‘grizzly’ then on ‘bear’. It is also useful if you use synonyms (you can find some on Thesaurus, and plenty other sites) or different spelling variants (for example color/colour, disc/disk, .. ). Capitol letters and punctuation marks are ignored by the engines, just as little words like ‘the, so, to, of, how, why, …’ . Last but not least, is it recommended to use 2 or more keywords, because you will find to many results by using only one.

6.2 Method

6.2.1 Keywords

Keywords can be combined by 3 boolean operators:

• The AND(+) operator looks for the documents using all provided keywords, although you can drop the AND in most engines because this is standard. In this way you can also search for little words. Example: ‘computer AND history’, ‘+the +little’
• The OR operator looks for at least one of the provided keywords. Example: ‘mohamed OR muhamed OR muhammad ali’
• By using the NOT(-) operator you can exclude keywords. Example: ‘bush -president’, ‘nerd NOT music’ (if you don’t search for the group N.E.R.D)

You can also search for a specific combination of words/phrase. Just put “ around the words. For example: “black panter”

This booleans are pretty familiar among the people. Most people even do not know there are many more. I will explain some in the next paragraphs.

6.2.2 File Format
You can search for a specific file format, you do this by typing filetype:yourformat , for example:
Word: filetype:doc
Linux variant for Word: filetype:odt or filetype:abw
Excel: filetype:xls
Acrobat Reader: filetype:pdf
Powerpoint: filetype:ppt
…

6.2.3 Numeric Ranges

This function makes it possible to search for webpages between 2 numbers. You can do this by putting 2 dots between them. This comes in handy when you for example want to search for a digital camera between 50 and 100 euros. This is how your search would look like: “digital camera” $50..$100

6.2.4 Occurrences

You can determine where on the page google has to look for your keyword.
allintitle:keyword Searches in the title for your keyword
intitle:keyword1 keyword2 Searches the first keyword in the title and the second in the rest of the page
allintext:keyword Searches in the text of the page
allinurl:keyword Searches in the URL of the page
inurl:keyword1 keyword2 Searches keyword1 in the title and keyword2 in the rest of the page
allinanchor:keyword Search in the links of the page
site: You can search in a specific site/domain. For example: bush site:cia.gov or weather site:.co.uk
I assume you do not need an example for the other ones, they speak for their own.

6.2.5 Information about a site/page
The next give you more information about a site/page:

info: This gives the information google has about the page. Here you also get a link to the other kinds of info (what I am now going to discuss)
link: Shows all the web pages who links to that site/page
related: Shows sites who are related to this one. You will mostly get a site who deals with the same subject.

6.2.6 Other
Maybe you already noticed you can do this all by using the advanced search. This just goes much faster, and that is part of a good search, right? Although there are things you cannot use in advanced search:
define: This gives a definition
~: This is, in my opinion, really useful. It does not only search for the keyword, but also for a synonym of the keyword. It even searches for derivatives of the word. If you type ~solution , it will also search for solve and solutions etc. It is also handy when you search a tutorial/article/guide etc. For example ~tutorial search for all those things.

7. End

I hope you all learned something from this article. You can now search much better and faster. Now you also have to use it! So if you have a question, just google it first, with the right method of course, and if you still have not found an answer, you can ask it in forums etc. Good Luck!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.