Section 8: Using Search Engines

Search Engines

What would the World Wide Web be without the powerful database searching tools provided by search engine websites? It would be basically like an immense library with millions of books on shelves stretching down endless corridors-all without any librarians or even a single card catalog.

The estimated number of web pages stands at more than 8 billion, and that number is growing all the time. But with search engines, you can type in keywords you want information about and be presented with results in just a matter of seconds-a truly amazing fact given the vast collection of information on the Internet.

Finding the best search engine for your purposes often boils down to personal preference. Here are the Web's top six search engines, which together comprise over 90 percent of searches conducted by users, and, not surprisingly, are some of the Internet's best-known brand names.

This section will discuss the different types of search engines and provide some ideas on how to get the most from your search engine use.

Indexes. Most search engines, including Google (by far the most popular), are index-based. Internet users like them because they return a large number of accurate results quickly.

Before a search engine can find web pages and files, it must first search the Web to locate and index all the data that's out there. A search engine accomplishes this with sophisticated software robots called "spiders," which scour web servers to search for web pages and links to yet more web pages. Spiders record all the words they find, creating a massive set of keywords that are then written to the search engine's database.

Directories. With directories, the search engine user compromises a bit of comprehensiveness for better organized and fewer irrelevant search results.

Directories are compiled by people based on websites that are submitted to their directories by website creators. Yahoo!'s directory is a good example of directory-based search engine.

Some search engines, called meta-search engines, are designed to solely to search the results of other search engines. These are powerful tools when you want complete search results, especially when trying to uncover difficult-to-find information. The most-popular meta-search engines include Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com), Mamma (http://www.mamma.com) and Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com).

Search engine tips. Getting the most from your search engine searches is more than just typing a word or two then clicking the Search button. How you combine the keywords in the search will help you get more accurate results. Each search engine website has its own set of features, but here are a few tips that apply to most any search engine you'll use:

·         Quotation marks. Putting quotation marks around two or more keywords will return results that exactly match the phrase. For example, typing "That Network" will return only results that contain this exact phrase. Typing "That Network" without the quotation marks will return all web pages containing the word "that" and the word "network". This would result in millions of search results completely unrelated to what the searcher was looking for.

·         Boolean operators. In mathematics, Boolean refers to a variable that can only have an answer of true or false. This same principle applies to search engine searches. Boolean operators (typically AND, OR and NOT) let you include or exclude keywords from your search results. For example, typing Vatican AND pope would return results that contain both words. Typing Vatican OR pope would return results that contained either word. Typing Vatican NOT pope would return results that contained "Vatican" but not "pope."

Some search engines, including Google, have eliminated true Boolean searches in favor of "advanced" searches that let you accomplish the same type of searches by filling keywords into different fields (http://www.google.com/advanced_search).

·         Math symbols. Similar to Boolean searches, you can use plus (+) and minus (-) signs to include or exclude words from your search. For example, typing winter + coats would return sites that contain both words, while typing winter - coats would return all search results for the word "winter" that did not have the word "coat" on the web page. The plus feature isn't particularly useful (typing winter coats without quotation marks does the same thing), but the negative sign is a helpful tool in narrowing the scope of a search.

·         Unique phrases. A clever way to find a narrowly defined set of search results is to type in a unique phrase you think might be on the types of web pages you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for information on starfish off the west coast of Canada, it would be more useful to type the keyword phrase starfish in the Pacific rather than just starfish.

Search engines are fairly easy to use, and the best way to learn their features is to pick one or more you are comfortable with and try different keyword combinations and practice with the website's searching features.

by Robert H. Fraass on Friday, March 11, 2005

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