Surf the Web
Go to a URL
Search Engines
Search Techniques
A Very Quick Guide for the Novice
 Place to Start
Surf the Web
simply means following hyperlinks which are of interest.
    You may see a link like this one Way Cool Stuff and follow it.

    Be careful; surfing can be seductive as you go from one page to another.

             
          Good starting places might be
          • Your institution's homepage
          • Sites which provide topics you can browse

 
Surf the Web Go to a URL Search Engines Search Techniques Finding a Place to Start

Go to a specific URL
which you already know.
URL= location or address of a web page
Where do you get the URLs?
        • Printed guides to the Internet
        • Email from collegues
        • Word of mouth


Some examples of URLs:


 
Surf the Web Go to a URL Search Engines Search Techniques Finding a Place to Start

Search engines
use software "robots" to examine the web and add sites to their databases.

These sites are then indexed. Each search engine is indexed in a different way.

  • Full-Text Indexing done automatically by searchbots (e.g., Alta Vista or Google)
  • Human Indexing (e.g., Yahoo)
Each search engine is also searched in a different way. It is important to find out how each engine is searched before you simply enter keywords.

On the home page of most search engines, one can find out how to search that particular site.

    -- Look for links which say 'Help' or 'Info About.'


There are also web pages devoted to the discussion and evaluation of search engines. See "Finding a Place to Start" later in this tutorial.

+ / -  of Searching the web

The ability to search for specific information on the web is its most powerful feature. But...

the very size of the web -- that is, the fact that so much information resides on the web -- can be a drawback to finding the information you really need or want.

  • The searcher must develop good searching techniques.
      • This will help in limiting retrieval to fewer but more relevant sites.
  • The searcher must learn to be discriminating about the information found on the web.

 
Surf the Web Go to a URL Search Engines Search Techniques Finding a Place to Start

Searching Techniques
Keywords Truncation Boolean Operators


Keywords are those specific words which are relevant to the information you seek. Keyword searches look for words appearing in a document in any order. For example, entering spring break or break spring would retrieve the same results -- documents which contain the words break and spring whether they are related or not.
  • Use general words for a broad search. For example,
      • Use Nutrition instead of Low Fat Diets
  • Use specific words for a narrower search. For example,
      • Use Battle of Gettysburg instead of Civil War
  • Use related words to pick up synonyms of similar concepts. For example,
      • Use both Oil and Petroleum
If you wish to search for keywords which appear in a certain order, e.g., spring break, you can use what is commonly called phrase searching.
  • Almost all search engines support phrase searching.
  • Some require that you put the phrase within quote marks, e.g. "spring break". 
  • Some engines default to phrase searching. 
        • Remember to use the "help" to see how to input phrases.

 

Truncation -- using the shortest form of a word which has different endings -- can be used in many search engines. For example, if you wish to retrieve any of these words Compute, Computer, Computers, Computing, you could enter Comput usually followed by some symbol like * or ?

As with phrase searching, this is done differently in different search engines:

  • Some engines do not allow truncation. (Webcrawler)
  • Some require a specific symbol, like #. (InfoMine)
  • In some engines, trunction is the default. (Magellan)

 

The use of boolean operators in your search enables you to more precisely tailor your search results.

There is a very useful site on the web which explains how this works. http://reinert.creighton.edu/resources/toolkit/boolean.htm
 

    To reiterate:
    • OR retrieves the largest set of items.
    • AND retrieves a smaller set.
    • NOT eliminates some items.

 
Surf the Web Go to a URL Search Engines Search Techniques Finding a Place to Start

 

Finding a Place to Start
Now if all of this seems somewhat confusing to you, you are not alone. 

The ACC Library Web site suggests several places to start:

http://library.austincc.edu/eresources/engines.htm

There are a number of guides on the web which explain and compare search engines.

You can consult an online guide put together by ACC reference librarians:
Finding& Evaluating Information on the Internet

 
Surf the Web Go to a URL Search Engines Search Techniques Finding a Place to Start


© Austin Community College, Library Services, 2001.

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Page author: mp
last updated: Jul 2003