|
|
|
|
 |
Successful Web Searching Trying to find that important nugget of information on the web can be time consuming and tedious and often fails to discover anything of real use. Iain Laskey looks at ways to improve your success by smarter use of search engines. The web is big. Really big. We are talking hundreds of millions of pages of information. Trying to find the information you want can be a nightmare often requiring different attempts via a variety of search engines and different key words. However, if you use a few simple tricks you can dramatically improve your success rate. The key is to be a bit smarter when interrogating the search engine. How search engines work Most search engines take a two pronged approach. The first thing they do is to index each and every word on a web site. They also make heavy use of meta tags. These are hidden codes inserted by web page designers that describe the main thrust of the page. As an example, a site that covers holidays in Cornwall might have the meta tags ‘holiday, cornwall, visit, hotel, bed and breakfast’ and so on. These are used to add a weighting to each site. How to search more effectively Most search engines use a similar syntax but I will use www.google.com as an example. Google only returns sites that contain all the words you specify, which is a help to begin with. If you want to find out about the Hawker Hurricane aircraft, you could enter ‘Hawker Hurricane’. Now, this might well work but it would also find items about a hurricane in a town called Hawker (it might exist!). To ensure you get what you want, put quote marks around any phrases e.g. ‘”Hawker Hurricane”’. Now, this might bring up lots of stuff, perhaps thousands of hits. You might only want to know about the pilots of these aircraft. So, now you can add extra words to reduce the search e.g. ‘”Hawker Hurricane” pilots’. In most cases, just using additional words and marking out exact phrases with quotation marks will do the trick. What if you really didn’t want to know about a pilot named Radders? You can exclude him with a minus sign so now we have ‘”Hawker Hurricane” pilots –radders’. This can also be useful if you are searching for a word that has multiple meanings. Perhaps you want to search for vinyl but only as a material, not an LP (ask your dad). You could enter ‘vinyl –LP –music – record’ to help strip out unwanted pages. Best of all, if you know what site the info is on but can’t find it, you can do a search that specifies a particular site using the keyword ‘site:’ e.g. ‘”Hancocks Half Hour” site:www.bbc.co.uk’ Getting Logical You can also use the operator OR with Google. This allows you to effectively do multiple searches at once. If you were researching The Battle of Britain’s aircraft you might search for ‘”Battle of Britain” Hurricane OR Spitfire’. This will return pages that contain the phrase ‘Battle of Britain’ and either Hurricane or Spitfire. You can use more than one OR if needed. Stop! Something to be careful of with search engines are stop words. A stop word is any common word that wouldn’t really help when searching such as ‘how’ or ‘where’. As a result, if you search for ‘how green was my valley’, the search engine would actually look for ‘green valley’. Now you could either wrap the whole thing in to a phrase such as ‘”how green was my valley”’ or you could add a plus to likely stop words to ensure they were being searched for e.g. ‘+how green +was +my Valley’. You can best judge which method suits a given search requirement. Other Options Each search engine has its own strengths and weaknesses and you may want to try several different ones for each search to maximise the hits. One way to simplify this is to use a site like www.dogpile.com . When you search, Dogpile send your requests to many different search engines then collates and sorts the responses for you. This can be a big time saver. If you do a lot of web based research you may want to consider a commercial tool such as Copernic 2000 available from www.copernic.com . This is a program which lets you select a theme such as MP3, Computer Hardware, Web UK and so on. Any searches are then sent to multiple search engines that specialise in each theme. You can add additional themes and search engines. The basic version is free to download and is highly recommended. More fully featured bells and whistles versions are available for purchase from the same site. Conclusion With a little extra effort and planning you can reap much better results from your web searches. These examples have been based on www.google.com but most other search engines work the same way. If in doubt, look for any online help that a particular search engine might offer as that will explain how best to use its extended capabilities.
|
