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Advanced Search Engines Class
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Class Description / Class Outline / Class Handout /Internet Links / Library Resources /Glossary of Computer Terms / For Additional Help |
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Class Description Advanced Search Engines is a two part class covering Advanced Yahoo! and Advanced Google. Yahoo! is offered one month and Google is offered the next. |
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Narrow your key words to narrow your search. If you have a phrase to search, put the phrase in quotes. Otherwise the engine will search for each word separately, e.g., "George Washington." Without the quotation marks you will likely get thousands of sites that contain the word "George" and/or "Washington" and may have nothing about "George Washington." Some engines use parentheses instead of quotation marks. Check the engine's Help section. AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, ADJACENT, FOLLOWED BY, BEFORE, AFTER. Type these "Boolean operators in capital letters and use spaces between the words. "George Washington" AND "Mount Vernong" is an example. With many engines you can use + for "AND" and - for "NOT." For some engines + means "look for this word" and - means "exclude this word," so you would need to put the + or - before each word. For example, to search for George Washington the person, you could ask the engine to look for +"George Washington"+Virginia-university-"District of Columbia"-state. Notice there are no spaces with this type of query. Some engines are case sensitive for capital letters and some are not. NEAR means, as it says, the key words have to be within a certain number of words of each other. Some engines allow you to specify the range, some do not and use a default number, for example, within 10 words. Use NEAR to look for words on the same page. For example, "George Washington" NEAR "Mount Vernon." BEFORE and AFTER work the same way as NEAR. NOT may also take the form BUT_NOT as in "George Washington" BUT_NOT university. ADJACENT and FOLLOWED BY both mean your key words will have to be next to each other on a site for the engine to report that the site to you. Use an asterisk (*) as a wild card. Place the asterisk to the right of the word you are searching and the engine will search for that word plus variations of the word. For example, if you type in row* you will find sites that have row, rower, rows, rowing and rowed. Typing two asterisks will give you even more variations on the word. Typing **think should bring returns not only for think, things, thinker, thinking, but also thought, thoughtful, etc. Some search engines use the dollar sign ($) instead of the asterisk. Again, check the "Help" section of the search engine. Some also allow the use of a question mark (?) in place of a letter in a word. You may be looking for information on the dog breed, borzoi, but are unsure if it ends in an "i" or a "y." You could try searching for borzo?. You can also use parentheses to build a query. "George Washington" AND (university OR state) will get you sites about George Washington University and the state of Washington. Be sure to check your spelling. The engine will look for words exactly as you spelled them. If you are searching for "principal" but spell it "principle" you will be out of luck. Type your key words in lower case letters (unless as with George Washington in the above examples you know what you are looking for will always be capitalized). Engines will then look for the word in both upper and lower case. If you type the key word capitalized, the engine will only look for sites where the word is capitalized. Use synonyms to broaden a search. For example, if you are looking for information on lungs, you could also type in pulmonary and respiratory (or respira*). Be sure and read the help section at each site to see how that site operates. Most use at least some of the techniques listed above, and may offer drop down menus or separate engines with the Boolean logic choices so you don't have to write them out yourself. Some engines will search only by key words, others will do conceptual searches. In a conceptual search you will get sites that the engine thinks are similar in topic to what you are looking for. At least one search site even rank orders search results according to whether the person registering the site with the search engine/index registered for free or paid a fee. Those paying a fee get ranked higher when search results are returned. With the revenue from banner ads going down, some search sites have resorted to taking payment to insert commercial results at the top of search results. Some sites make it obvious and some do not. This is becoming more common with the dropping revenue for search sites. Some, such as Infoseek, have folded. Others, such as Excite, have been sold. Some search sites have people review sites for inclusion in the index. Others use computers to search sites on the Internet and people don't review them at all, and each search site's computer (usually known as a "spider") categorizes the sites in a different way. That is why it is useful to use a metasearch site, like Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), which simultaneously searches many engines and indexes. It really is amazing to see how different the results are from different search sites even when you use exactly the same key words to search. Vivisimo (http://vivisimo.com/) and Ixquick(http://ixquick.com/) are excellent metasearch engines. You can also use meta words to specify your search. For example, to narrow your search to a specific time frame, you can type "after:1/1/98" in the search box along with your key words and the engine (if it is capable) will narrow the search results to sites created or modified after that date. Other meta words are domain, feature (such as video, acrobat, shockwave, frame, image), linkdomain, linktext, newsgroup, scriptlanguage, title, url, and, for time: after, before, and within (time frame). "The Whole Internet," by Conner-Sax and Krol is an excellent source for search techniques and for overall Internet information. It is published by O'Reilly. Advanced Google Class What you will learn in this class: Go
Shopping Advanced Yahoo Class What you will learn in this class: Start
an online community in Yahoo groups |
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Internet Links |
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Library Resources |
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Glossary of Computer Terms |
| CPU: the central processing unit that reads and performs instructions & stores information |
| Directory: a catalog of sites by subject |
| Dragging: the process of moving an object by clicking on it with the left mouse button & while holding the button down move the object to its desired location & release |
| E-mail: electronic messages sent between computers that are connected on a network |
| Home Page: usually the first page you see at a Web site, it is the site's main page |
| Internet: a diverse set of interlinked world-wide computer networks |
| Keyboard: an input device that allows users to type in commands on a computer |
| Monitor: an output device which displays information, it is similar to a television set |
| Mouse: a hand held input device that allows users to point & click to make selections on the screen |
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For Additional Help WRL computer volunteers: call 259-4050 for the latest volunteer schedule |
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