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Searching the World Wide Web Information and charts in this workshop are from pandia.com Logos were taken from various web pages for illustration purposes. . How do you find the information you want? . Browse and hope? Hunt and waste time? Search haphazardly? Wander and wonder?
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Searching the World Wide WebInformation and charts in this workshop are from pandia.comLogos were taken from various web pages for illustration purposes.
How do you find the information you want? • Browse and hope? • Hunt and waste time? • Search haphazardly? • Wander and wonder? • Stumble upon? • Get lucky? • Ask for help? • Pray?
Tools for Finding Information • Search Engines • Directories • Libraries • Online Encyclopedias • Wikipedia
Techniques for Finding Information • Patience • Utilize Search Engines • Directories • Library Resources • Use Key Search Words • Refine Search • Boolean
Search Directories • Search directories – Yahoo is the most well known. • hierarchical databases with references to websites. The websites that are selected by people/organizations and classified by that search service. • Directories are useful for general well known.
Pandia Power Search • Has an Open directory • A catalogue compiled by people worldwide • General Categories with hierarchy • You are searching the text contained in the site title and the description of the site • search the words contained in the category titles or descriptions • may add information from search engines if no matches are found • http://www.pandia.com
Search Engines • Search engines crawl the Web looking for new web pages. These engines scan the web pages and put the it into a large accessible database. • No search engine covers the whole Net; it is best to utilize multiple search engines for a thorough search of the web. • http://www.google.com/ • http://search.yahoo.com • http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US
Metasearch Engines • These search engines search several engines and directories at the same time. • Extracts the most relevant information
What are the best Metaengines? • http://vivisimo.com/html/searchdoneright • http://www.ixquick.com/ • http://www.pandia.com/metasearch/
News Search The Pandia Newsfinder
Now that you know which engine to use….refine your search • Be specific • Use key words • Use Booleans • Most search engines interpret the space between words as AND. • Some engines interpret the space between the words as OR. • Boolean searching is supported by most of the major search engines. • Pages including the words following AND NOT will not be listed.
Phrases • Use double quotation marks: "...", like this: • “red apples" AND “green apples" AND “yellow apples" • This will tell the search engine to look for pages that include the two word text string and not the single word such as ‘red’
Searches Utilizing Proximity • When there is a sequence of words that are normally connected, but that may be displayed or listed in another way, such as Janet Jean King Janet J. King • You may use the NEAR search operator. • NEAR means "show me pages where these words are near each other". Janet near/3 King • finds documents in which Janet and King occur within three words of each other, in either order." • By altering the number, you decide the distance between keywords • .
Case Sensitivity • Some search engines and directories are partially case sensitive. • lower case letters typed in the search box will match both upper and lower case letters on the webpage • Janet King or janet king • With the use of capital letters in "Bill Brown", your search will not include pages with the words bill (meaning invoice) and brown (meaning color).
Parentheses and Wildcards • (“red apples" AND pie) OR (yellow apples AND cake) • Parentheses help to clarify the search • hot* • This wildcard asterisk will give you search results including • Hot, hotter, hotel, hotels, etc.
~Tilde • Google’s "tilde"-operator allows you to search for synonyms. • Place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of a keyword • Google will replace your keyword with other similar words therefore enlarging your search.
If Boolean is too difficult – just use Math! +red +apple+yellow-Jonathan-pie Place a + sign in front of words that must be included on the webpage. Place a - sign in front of a word to subtract pages that contain that particular word.
Field searching • Title magazine AND title:gardening. • URL “red apples" AND url:pandia.com/goalgetter • DomainSpitfire AND car AND domain:.uk • (.com) and (.net) • US educational (.edu) • US governmental (.gov) • US military (.mil)
If you Get an Error Code • Delete the last part of the address until you come to the next "/". • This will enable you to go to the main index of the webpage • The main webpage or index in most directories is named index.html • Yahoo! has more information on error codes: http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/writeus/error.html