An introduction to effective internet searching

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An introduction to effective internet searching

• Lorraine Sperring
• Learning Teaching Resources Adviser

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Handy hints and tasty tips

• Become familiar with a couple of search engines
  rather than trying loads of them
• Use the help offered within the individual search
  engines to refine your search
• Make sure you understand which default the search
  engine uses, i.e. when you enter two or more
  search terms whether it combines them using or
  or and

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• Be as specific as possible to reduce the number
  of hits, i.e. amend your search by adding
  additional terms
• If you get too few hits, check your spelling
  consider using truncation (usually ) or an
  or search
• Generally the most plausible results are listed
  first. If you cant find what youre looking for
  in the first couple of pages, try amending your
  search

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• No search engine indexes the entire Web. The fact
  that you havent found something does NOT mean
  its not out there somewhere. Try a different
  search engine, a metasearch engine or consider
  using a subject gateway

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Metasearch engines

• Because all engines index the Web differently you
  will get the best results by using more than one
  search engine. Metasearch engines are useful
  because they sent your query to several different
  search engines at once and collate the results

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Examples

• Metacrawler - http//www.metacrawler.co.uk long
  established and popular
• Ask Jeeves - http//www.ask.co.uk accepts your
  question in plain English, but can give
  irrelevant results
• Dogpile - http//www.dogpile.co.uk/ - returns
  results from 10 leading search engines.

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Subject gateways

• These are organised indexes of Web sites that
  allow the user to browse by topic in search of
  relevant information
• Sites included have been selected, often by
  librarians, as authoritative, comprehensive and
  useful sites in subject specific areas
• Search engines provided by the gateways do not
  search the whole web but just the resources
  selected. Therefore there are far fewer hits to
  scan which is more effective for browsing

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Examples

• RDN Resource Discovery Network -
  http//www.rdn.ac.uk an excellent collection of
  subject gateways developed in the UK and designed
  to bring you Websites relevant to teaching,
  learning and research
• Pinakes - http//www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/p
  inakes.html Links to many major subject gateways
  are at
• Or http//www.rsc-london.ac.uk/cms/250/

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How to search

• Be specific search engines are very clever, but
  they cannot read minds
• Use more than one keyword if possible to narrow a
  search (but no more than 6-8 as above this number
  search engines tend not to work as effectively)
• If you are searching for something like apple,
  they dont know whether youre interested in the
  fruit, New York or the computer company

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• Punctuation some search engines ignore most
  punctuation, except apostrophes, hyphens and
  quotation marks.
• Its always worth running a search a few ways
  (bow-tie, bow tie, bowtie, St Pauls, St Pauls)
  if you dont get what you were expecting or
  hoping for

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• Quotations - if you want only the web pages that
  contain your words in order, put them in
  quotation marks. If you search for to be or not
  to be you will get a totally different set of
  results that if you search for to be or not to be

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Helpful sites

• Government papers - http//www.infed.org/hp-govern
  ment.htm will give you a list of UK government
  papers sites
• Or try http//www.official-documents.co.uk/ which
  contains a selection of Government titles
  covering a broad range of topics including the
  economy, work and welfare, health, transport and
  the environment

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Answer the following questions

• How high is Mount Everest? (Try using Ask Jeeves
  (http//www.ask.co.uk) and Google
  (http//www.google.co.uk))
• What is the capital of Latvia? (Try using Ask
  Jeeves (http//www.ask.co.uk) and Google
  (http//www.google.co.uk))
• Where would you find a photo of a Sherman tank?

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• Where would you find a list of post codes?
• What is the first verse of Im forever blowing
  bubbles?
• How would you find somebodys telephone number?
  (assuming that theyre not ex-directory)
• Search for yourself

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http//www.ferl.becta.org.uk/
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(No Transcript)
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http//www.rdn.ac.uk
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http//www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/
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More tutorials

• Try the following internet tutorials
• Internet Detective - http//www.sosig.ac.uk/desire
  /internet-detective.html - requires registration
  (free)
• Tonic - The Online Netskills Interactive Course -
  http//www.netskills.ac.uk/TonicNG/cgi/sesame?tng
  - requires registration (free)