Transcript CEP 413/613 WebQuest Two Searching the World Wide Web: A

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?
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=enUS
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
• Domain Spitfire 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
Addresses on the Internet