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Web Searches
Web Searches ©
R. Craig Collins, 2005/6
Searching Techniques at Most Search Engines
To increase the precision of your search results, many search engines require
that most of the words in your search string be present in the result documents.
So, it may be better to start by listing just a few key words, and
add additional terms to refine searches.
To gain even more control over your results, please read through the following
hints.
- Most search engines support full Boolean capability; Boolean terms are AND,
OR, & NOT.
- Use AND to connect a series
of keywords you would expect to be in your documents, this forces the search
engine to include that word in documents.
Example: War AND Peace
will return documents that contain both the word War and the word
Peace, not just one or the other as with a simple series of words.
- Use OR to retrieve documents that include
either of the search words
Example: encryption OR cryptography
will locate documents that either include the word encryption or
the word cryptography.
- Use NOT to indicate a word that must
not appear in the documents. Example:
dolphins NOT NFL
will deliver searches on the mammal, rather than the football team.
- Some browsers use + and - instead of AND
or NOT; you may use
a + (plus) to indicate words that must be present in the documents
and a - (minus) for those that must not be present. Examples:
+dolphins
-NFL
+recipes for +cake
-nuts
- Use quotes around specific phrases to focus your search on occurrences of
the actual phrase.
Example
“War AND
Peace”
will return documents with the phrase "War and Peace" (such as discussion
of the book by Leo Tolstoy), instead of random pages on conflict and quiet;
thus you can use quotes to force the search on the phrase, rather than individual
words,
- Slowly add additional words in your search if the results are still too
random, but don't do this too early... you may be putting blinders on the
search engine, and miss good results. The often, the more words you enter,
the more on target your results will be. Examples:
ski resorts Vermont
(instead of skiing)
ergonomic workstation mouse keyboard
(instead of ergonomics)
- Most search engines support a truncation symbol (wildcard) in queries. Often
you must have at least four non-wildcard characters in a word before you introduce
a wildcard. The * (asterisk) can be used to replace multiple
characters.
(Please note that often search engines automatically stems most common plural
and singular forms of words; a search on cat will also return results
containing the word cats, and a search on cats will return results
containing the word cat.)
Examples:
chemi* will find results containing words that begin with 'chemi' (e.g.
chemical, chemistry, chemist)
psych*ist will find all results which contain words that begin and
end with 'psych' and 'ist' (e.g. psychologist, psychiatrist)
A list of search engines:
http://www.google.com
http://www.ask.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://altavista.com
What search Engines Look For
Some Search engines simply take the first 25 words or so that appear on your
page and compare searches to just those words. But, many search engines use
the <META> tag, nested in the <HEAD> when collecting data to include
in the search engine database.
There are many variations
- <meta name="description" content="your info">
Which allows the search engine to capture a description you create, and
- <meta name="keywords" content="your info">
Which allows the search engine to capture keywords you designate.
There are other <META> tags, as well, such as
- <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Which tells the the browser which character set was used to render typed
items,
- <META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 [set by ratings
bureau]r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
Which allows the browser to detect parental control ratings (See RSACi),
and
- <META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="x; URL=y">
Which allows you to automatically jump to another page 'y' after 'x' seconds.
(You could even force the current page to be reloaded...)