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Search Tool Choices -- For a wide variety of tools--search engines, metasearch engines, and subject directories visit: http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/searchtip.html

For a variety of high quality databases, visit http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/catalogs.html

Tips for using search engines:

Your results are likely to be as good as your queries.  A poor result list is not the fault of the engine, but more often the result of a poorly planned search.

How to structure a good search engine query:

• Brainstorm several key words and phrases—the ones you think would appear in your dream document
• Also consider the words that should NOT appear in your dream documents—for instance when researching the planet Saturn, you’ll want to eliminate references to cars and automobiles.  With Dolphins, you’ll likely want to avoid football.
• Understand syntax, or the language of the search engine.  This is revealed in the help or tips page and will guide you to how to use that tool most effectively. 
• Put most important words and phrases first
• Consider phrases—which words are likely to appear next to each other in exact order in good results?  Names like “Martin Luther King”  “vitamin A”
• Focus on nouns (verbs are often vague, stop words, like articles—a, an, the—are ignored by most engines)
• Consider alternate forms of words (truncate when you can)  adolesc*  for adolescent, adolescents, adolescence
• Check your spelling.  Bad spelling usually turns up bad hits
• Follow “more like this” leads when you get a good result
• Good searchers use advanced search screens.  They offer far more power and precision Use Boolean when you can.  Use field searching when you can
• Mine result lists for important words, names, and phrases you didn’t think of originally.

When to use sea rch engines:

• When you have a narrow topic or several keywords.
• When you are looking for a specific site.
• When you want to do a comprehensive search and retrieve a large number of documents on your topic.
• When you want to search for an advanced search screen or search for particular types of documents, file types, source locations, languages, date last modified, etc.
• When you want to take advantage of newer retrieval technologies, such as concept clustering, ranking by popularity, link ranking, etc.

                  Metasearch engines:

Search across a variety of search tools and organizes the collected results. 

Are good for a broad sweep type search.

Often don't offer the same precision you’d get when you search search engines you know.  Syntax varies.  

What are subject directories?

• Links to resources arranged in subject hierarchies, encouraging users to both browse through, and often search for, results. (This is like the subject or topic browse  in subscription databases)           
• Subject directories are often annotated.  
• They are selected, evaluated, and maintained by humans.    

                        When to use them:

• When you are just starting out, or have a broad topic or one major keyword or phrase (example: “Civil War”)
• When you want to get to the best sites on a topic quickly
• When you value annotations and assigned subject headings which may help retrieve more relevant material
• When you want to avoid viewing the many noise documents picked up by search engines.

Boolean operators

(Most search engines, like Google, now assume an AND)

AND limits your search, requiring that both or all word appear

Vietnam AND protest AND students
+Japan +cooking

car OR automobile
coronary OR heart

Martin Luther NOT King
+eagles -Philadelphia -football

Wildcards/Truncation

Some search tools allow you to use an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) to stand for any character or string of characters. This method is especially useful if you are uncertain of spelling or if you want to pick up varying forms of a word.

teen* (picks up teenage, teenagers, or teens)
Herz* (for Herzegovina)
woman (for woman or women)

Natural language searches

Some search engines (Ask Jeeves, for instance) allow you to type in questions as you would think or speak them.

"Why is the sky blue?"

Phrases

You often will want words to appear together in specific order. Commonly, quotation marks ("") set words off as phrases to be searched as a whole. (Some search engines use parentheses, commas, or hyphens instead of quotation marks.)

"vitamin A"
"raisin in the sun"
"George Washington Carver"

Proximity

Words are often not meaningful in a search unless they appear near each other in a document. In large documents, words separated by lots of text are generally unrelated.

ADJ specifies that two words appear next to each other.

global ADJ warming

Eric Clapton NEAR/10 Cream

Field searching

This strategy restricts searches to certain portions of Web documents. It allows you to specify that the search words appear, for instance, in the title, URL, or first paragraph.

title: cancer
URL: epa

Case sensitivity

Most search engines are case insensitive by default, that is, they treat upper and lower case letters the same. However, there are some that recognize uppercase and lowercase variations. It is good practice to search using lower case letters unless you have a specific strategy in mind.

Baker (retrieves name and eliminates most references to cake and bread makers)
AIDS (eliminates reference to helpers)
China (eliminates references to dishes)

A tip about tips

Remember to read carefully the "tips page" of the search tools you use most frequently. These pages discuss the syntax, or the specific search language, used by that particular search engine or directory.

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Copyright 2003 School District of Springfield Township - Updated 2/3/03--All Rights Reserved