For a guide to databases, see General topics - Databases

Search engines: Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, Webcrawler, Lycos, Excite

Registering a web site with a search engine:

• Search engines use spiders (or crawlers) to trawl the web looking for new sites. If a link exists to a site, a spider will (eventually) find it.
• Search engines used to classify sites according to meta tags (“meta search engines”).
  <meta name = “keywords” content = “keyword1 keyword2 keyword3” />
  <meta name = “description” content = “a brief description of the site’s contents” />
  Not done now to avoid misuse (e.g. keywords matching commonly searched words e.g. “Brittney Spears”).
• Now engines classify sites according to keywords they contain. Misuse includes “keyword stuffing”.
• Search engines can now search file types other than just HTML e.g. Doc, PDF etc.

An information portal (or Directory) only finds a web site based on manual (i.e. deliberate) submissions.

Search engine index contains a list of all the sites registered. You can query search engines by accessing menus of topics available (directory search) rather than by entering keywords.

Google performs statistical analysis to count links to sites giving priority to sites with many links (“popular” sites). Open to misuse (“Link farms” are web sites containing nothing but links to boost popularity).

Advanced keyword searches:

• Find keyword1 OR keyword2, keyword1 AND keyword2 (Boolean operators)
• Match exact phrases only (enclose “within quotation marks”)
• Find sites that do not contain certain keywords e.g. Find printers AND laser NOT inkjet.
• Use * to indicate parts of words e.g. print* to match printer, printing etc.

Strategies:

• Be as specific as possible in choice of keywords.
• Put most important keywords first – they are given priority.
• Where possible use quotation marks to combine keywords into phrases.
• Boolean operators in upper case (AND, OR, NOT), lower case for keywords
• Combine Boolean phrases using parentheses (brackets) to specify search order.

Don’t forget to evaluate pages found on the web for its accuracy and value. Use your common sense. There are no quality control standards on the web, and you cannot assume anything you found on the web must be true.

• Who owns the web site? Is it a “respectable” organisation such as a company or university?
• Who created it? Does it contain the author’s name/E-mail address?
• When was it last updated? Some information can become out of date quickly.
• Examine links found on the site. Site developers should ask permission before including a link, so links to “respectable” sites suggest this site may also be respectable.
• How does the information on the site compare with information in print?
• How was the site’s ranking determined by the search engine?

Two ways of citing web site references in academic documents

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers:

• Bowles, Richard. “Beginner’s Guide to JavaScript” LWL Magazine July 2005 <http://richardbowles.tripod.com/javascript/intro.htm>

The Chicago Manual of Style:

• Richard Bowles, “Beginner’s Guide to JavaScript” LWL Magazine July 2005, http://richardbowles.tripod.com/javascript/intro.htm (accessed May 2006)

(In each case the article appears both in LWL Magazine July 2005 and on the World Wide Web.)

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