Forest Hills High School

Searching the Internet Workshop

 

 

 

This workshop aids users in choosing the best tools to use for different kinds of searches. It differentiates search indexes from subject guides and offers tips on when to use each engine. This page outlines different searching techniques, Boolean syntax, phrase searching, truncation, and field searching, among other features, for several services. Click on one of the following links to view the different types of Internet searching tools.

 

 

Included here are selected services that provide searching of very large indexes of Internet resources. Each service is comprised of 3 components: a "robot" of some sort that automatically collects links, titles, and text from millions of Internet sites; a database where the resource information is stored; and a search engine that allows the user to interrogate the database for sites of interest. Some services also provide a limited browsable subject catalog, but the primary goal of each tool in this section is to provide a large, searchable database of Internet resources. In addition to these large indexes are meta-searchers, which take relatively simple input and search many indexes at once.

AltaVista

http://altavista.digital.com/

Excite

http://www.excite.com/

HotBot

http://www.hotbot.com/

Infoseek Ultraseek

http://www.infoseek.com/

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com/

Northern Light

http://www.northernlight.com/

WebCrawler

http://www.webcrawler.com/

Google

http://www.google.com

Meta-searchers:

DogPile

http://www.dogpile.com/

MetaFind

http://www.metafind.com/

MetaCrawler

http://www.metacrawler.com/

SavvySearch

http://savvy.cs.colostate.edu:2000/

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Included here are selected services that provide extensive resource directories organized by subject. Users can browse the subject hierarchy for a single link to a resource that fits a specific need, or gather multiple links on a particular topic. The resources are collected and placed in the hierarchy by people, as opposed to electronic robots. In most cases the Subject Directories are also searchable, but the major benefit of each tool in this section is the ability to review multiple resource titles related to specific topics.

Yahoo

http://www.yahoo.com/

LookSmart

http://www.looksmart.com

Librarians' Index to the Internet

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/

Library Classification:

BUBL LINK

http://bubl.ac.uk/link/

INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections

http://lib-www.ucr.edu/

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Included here are services that annotate a large percentage of the resources in their directory, as opposed to Subject Catalogs, which simply gather links to pages on a certain subject. The annotations are usually written by staff writers. Users can read about a given resource before choosing to follow the link to the site. In some cases a rating of the resource is done by staff editors based on established criteria. These services provide a high level of human intervention in resource discovery.

eBlast

http://www.eBLAST.com/

Lycos Top 5%

http://point.lycos.com/categories/

Magellan

http://www.mckinley.com/

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Subject guides are collections of subject resources where each subject is presided over by a maintainer or author. In this case, the maintainer or author is usually a subject expert, and the resources should be of high quality because they have been filtered and picked specifically for the guide. Resources in subject guides are sometimes annotated, and the level of annotation varies by guide.

AlphaSearch

http://www.calvin.edu/library/as/

Argus Clearinghouse

http://www.clearinghouse.net/

The W3C Virtual Library

http://www.vlib.org/

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Definitions of Search Functions

Boolean Searching: Allows terms to be put into logical groups by the use of connective terms. For example, cats AND dogs narrows a search. Cats OR dogs broadens a search. Cats NOT dogs narrows a search. Each service explains its connective terms for Boolean searching in its help or FAQ file. Note that some systems are defaulted to a certain connective term without the use of that term. In other words, in some cases cats dogs is treated as cats OR dogs.

 

Field Searching: Web pages are made up of many parts, including title, URL, text of the page, links from the page, images on the page, etc. Some search engines allow these fields to be searched. Combining these field searches in one search can help the user to greatly increase the relevance of the retrieved items, as well as allow for searching for specific information such as how many other pages link to a certain page.

 

Key word in context (KWIC): These searches will return the key word and N words near the key word to give the user the context in which the key word was found.

 

Phrase Searching: Allows searching of phrases when available. Note that some systems can be confusing if you think that "Scout Report" is searching the two words together as a phrase, when in fact the engine is searching Scout OR Report.

 

Proximity Searching: Allows searching of one term within N words of another term, narrowing the search.

 

Relevance Feedback: Attempts to measure how closely the retrieval matches the query, usually in quantitative terms between 0 and 100 or 0 and 1,000.

 

Truncation Searching: Allows searching on different word endings or plurals with the use of a truncation wild card symbol. For example, if the truncation symbol is *, then the search term econ* will return items that contain economics, economy, economic, and econometric. Car* will return items that contain cars and cartoon, so it is advisable to use truncation symbols judiciously. See individual help files for the specific truncation symbol used with each engine, when available.