Search Engines

Hunting the Information Needle in the Internet Haystack

Information overload is one of the biggest problems with using the Internet. Finding what you want can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. For each search you are likely to get not only too much information but the wrong kind.

Search engines are the main tools that Internet browsers such as Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer use to help you find information and narrow down your searches. Search engines aren't all the same though and each one you use takes a little time to learn to use well. For example, if you use the Lycos search engine to search for "John Major", you will get links to 91365 unsorted Web documents, the Excite search engine narrows this down to only 8377 possible links to documents sorted from an index, while the Yahoo search engine will give you only I category and 10 sites. Even so, all three return links such as Yahoo's link to the Major League Baseball homepage, and Port St. John!

A little knowledge about and practice using search engines will give you the skills you need to whittle down the choices so you get what you want as quickly as possible. Let's take a look at how to search, what happens when you search, which is the best search engine, and how to help students get to where they need to be.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines generally have two functions; collecting existing information and providing information to users. Often referred to as robots, worms, or spiders, when collecting, they wander, crawl, or roam Internet sites, and bring back resources such as titles, descriptions, and Web page addresses, that are then indexed and organised into a database. In addition to automatic collection, some search engines also index information manually to eliminate useless titles and provide searchable subject indexes to sites. Search engines also provide an interface between the person searching for information and the indexed database of resources it has collected.

About the only thing growing faster than the Internet itself is the number of search engines to help you track down the information you need. There are currently more than 300 to choose from. The best search engines are large (their database contains 30 - 50 million Web pages), the information they provide is current, they search quickly and can handle a lot of users at once, have useful search features, and are easy to use. John Holmes, a reference librarian at the University of Washington undergraduate library who teaches in-service Internet classes to teachers, advises them to think about case of use, power, and accuracy of results when selecting a search engine. Currently, he suggests teachers use AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite as their primary search engines.

The Best Search Engines for Academic Use

Before using a search engine for the first time it is useful to review its "Search" examples, if provided. For example, go to the main search page for AltaVista and then click the Help button in the logo. This takes you to a Help page that explains how simple queries work. If you get good at searching and want to try an advanced query, click the Advanced button in the logo and then click the Help button. There is also a Help button on the main search page for Excite.

What's the Difference?

Each of these four recommended search engines uses slightly different techniques to help you find information and narrow searches.

AltaVista

Just type keywords into the basic search form, press the Enter key or click the Submit button, and you're off. AltaVista first tells you how many matches it found for each word and then lists results. A hotlinked title and URL are provided along with the first few words of the page's text, a file size, and the date the entry was inserted into the AltaVista database. Results are ranked with the best match appearing first. The best feature is that after you've submitted a search, your keywords remain in the form so that revising the search is easier.

Yahoo

Type your keywords into the search box and click New Search. Yahoo is a good all-around search engine. Yahoo doesn't prioritize results, which sometimes means you have to wade through dozens of URLs that might not contain the information you are looking for. It's best feature is that if it can't find what you're looking for it can feed your search terms to six or more other Web search engines to provide broader coverage.

Lycos

Type your search item in the For box and click Go Get It. Lycos returns its results ranked according to relevance rating (ranging from a low of 0.0 to a high of 1.0) and also indicates how many terms in your search were actually matched. A hotlinked title is returned along with an outline, an abstract, and a URL. A great feature is that you can get other information on the Web site from the search page in a detailed results report that supplies you with the number of links a page has to other pages, as well as the words matched on the page.

Excite

Type your keywords or search string into the What box on the Excite form, make sure World Wide Web is selected in the Where box and click Search. Although Excite doesn't provide the sophistication of AltaVista, its concept search feature returns pages that don't include your search terms but do include information about the terms. The engine lists results in order of relevance, with a graphic that shows ranges of accuracy. The best feature is that you can click this graphic to find similar documents, thereby refining your search without having to submit any new terms. The results of an Excite search include a hotlinked document but no URL.

Narrowing the Search

To narrow your search use words that are as specific as possible and use Boolean operators which are words, phrases, capitalization, or symbols like AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, +, ;, or -, (), $.

For example, If you type Presidential Election Results AND 1996, both phrases will be present in the resulting documents. If you type Presidential Election Results OR 1996, at least one will be present. If you type Presidential Election Results NOT 1996, resulting documents will exclude those from 1996.

Practice makes perfect and the more you use these techniques the better you'll get at them.

Tips for Searching

• Be as descriptive as you want when searching. For example, try typing in your search as a sentence: "Where can I find out about the industrial revolution?" in Excite, and you'll strike gold on the first page of search results The search box for all these engines holds as many words as you like. Words like the, those, and a will be automatically stripped out by the engine.
• Double-check your spelling. Even a small error can skew results.
• Getting back to a page you've lost: try searching on any words that you can remember from the page. If at first you don't succeed, try another search engine.
• Capitatise proper names, like John Major (instead of john major) when looking for them and most search engines will only return pages where they are capitalised.
• Learn how to use Boolean operators to help narrow your search. The AltaVista search engine, for example, provides excellent examples of how these work
• If the search engine you are using displays a lot of pictures, you can speed it up by viewing in text-only mode through the same options menu.

And Finally!
Dogpile is an invaluable new search program that does all the work for you. It searches all the above search engine databases and a few more besides. It can be configured to your own specifications, i.e. showing only the top 10 hits from each engine.

It also has a Metasearch facility. This searches documents for words enclosed in the tags usually found at the top of an HTML document. Try it - it's one of the most exciting new items to be found on the web to date!