Transcript Efficient Web Searches - Shelby County Schools

Pick Your Site
• No one site is good for every search.
• Yahoo and Lycos are DIRECTORIES, not search
engines. They are good for researching general
topics.
• Google and Alta Vista are search engines and are
better for yielding very specific information.
• Metasearch sites like Dogpile and Metacrawler
yield specific information by utilizing more than
one search engine.
• Most search engines do a poor job when
seeking out a single word.
• Increase the number of words to increase
the scope of your search.
• Choose your search words well -- many
search engines ignore common words like
'the,' 'and' and 'Web.'
Pick Your Words
Use Operators!
• Most search sites use code words or
symbols called operators to make searches
more precise.
• The operators vary from site to site, but the
common ones are AND, OR, NOT,
quotation marks and the plus and minus
sign.
How Operators Work
• '' ''-- (quotation marks) enclose words to search for
an exact phrase: ''Strawberry Fields Forever''
• AND connects two or more words, all of which
must appear in the results: Strawberry AND
Fields AND Forever
• OR connects two or more search words, any of
which may appear in the results: Strawberry
Fields OR Strawberryfields
• More…
• NOT excludes the word after it from the results:
Strawberry Fields NOT W.C.
• - (minus sign), like NOT, excludes the word that
follows it: Strawberry Fields -W.C.
• + (plus sign) precedes a word that must appear:
+Strawberry +Fields (both words must appear in
results)
• Note that it is possible to string together several
operators to construct a very precise query. To
exclude certain cover versions of a certain song,
for example, you could try: Strawberry Fields
AND The Beatles NOT Sandy Farina NOT
Nashville Superpickers
Cover All The Bases
• If you're looking for gardening tips, for example, you may
need to account for several different words -- garden,
gardens, gardening, gardener and so on.
• Infoseek and Lycos handle plurals and word stems
automatically.
• Alta Vista uses a different approach, the wildcard
character. Enter garden* and you'll get results on all of the
different options. Search sites that don't recognize word
stems or wildcards need you to think of variants by
yourself and search for them all (e.g., garden OR
gardening OR gardens).
• Open a link in a new browser window by
holding down the Shift key while clicking
on the link. If a page fails to load the first
time you click on a link, try clicking again.
• This allows you to return to your results
page without hitting the Back button.
Use Browser
Click Tricks
Don’t Stick Around
• If you don't find what you're looking for in
the first couple of results screens, either go
back and enter a different set of search
terms or move on to another search site.
Created by Jo Ellen Mattingly
Montevallo Elementary School