June, 2009: Better Web Searching

Revised version of March, 1996 and November, 2003: Web Search Tools

by Deborah Healey

Everyone, it seems, searches the web for one thing or another. People who are looking for something to buy generally find more or less what they want. If you are looking for reliable academic sources, however, you are much less likely to find what you want. This tech tip will offer a few suggestions for ways to look that may help you find what you want a bit more effectively.

Helpful Vocabulary

• A "query" is what you typed in the Search for: box--it's what you want to find.
  
  
• A "hit" is something that was found that fits the criteria you gave for the search.
  
  
• An "entry" is the information you see about each "hit." Entries will be shown on the Results page of your search.
  
  
• A "search engine" is a program that follows certain rules to look through the World Wide Web and bring back information about places that fit what you've asked for.
  
  
• A "portal" is a site that provides links to information about a particular topic or a site that links different topics that may be of interest to a specific group of people.
  
  
• "Premium placement" is what advertisers pay for. This is an earlier place on the list of hits. With Google, "premium placement" is at the top of the page and labeled as a "Sponsored Link."
  
  
• "Natural language" is the way that people speak, not necessarily the way that computers organize data.

General Tips

You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to search more effectively. Here are some useful ideas for any Web search:

• Choose a search engine that is designed to find what you want.
• Put the most important word first if you are using more than one keyword.
• Your best hits are generally in the first 20 -- you're better off trying to refine a search than to look much further than that.
• Avoid common words like "the" or "a" in your web search.
• Use quotation marks around phrases, such as "learning styles" or "movie reviews" or "qualitative research".
• Use and (+), not (-), and or to limit or expand your search. These are Boolean operators. For more information about them, see my Search Strategies tech tip.
• If you can't find what you're looking for, try another way to say it.

Choosing a search engine

Google is a good, general-purpose search engine. However, it's not the best choice if you are looking for academic sources or other specialized needs. There are discipline-specific portals, such as Intute's Arts and Humanities Hub; there are librarian-recommended sites, such as Librarians' Internet Index; and there are kid-friendly sites, such as KidsClick! and Ask Kids.

For an overview of the choices, see Choose the Best Search for your Information Needs. It lists a variety of specialized search engines as well as more general-purpose ones like Google.

There are a few search engines that claim to use natural language, where you can ask the question the way that you think about it. For example, I typed in What is the best natural language search engine? rather than "natural language" "search engine" as I would in Google. They don't seem to be very good yet, but your question may be one that the search engine can answer well. Examples of this type of search engine are Hakia and Ask (though Ask seems very ad-heavy).

Google

• Click on Advanced to make it easier to do an advanced search. Many of the suggestions that follow are on the Advanced screen.
• Put the most important word first.
• Search for a phrase by putting " " around the phrase, such as "peanut butter"
• Using a + sign in front of a required word (+peanut +butter) means that you want only things with both peanut and butter somewhere in the document.
• You can make a NOT relation by putting a space then a hyphen in front of a word you don't want. For example,
  star -wars
  would eliminate documents about Star Wars. Notice that there must be a space before but not after the hyphen for this to work.
• Use a tilde (~) to get synonyms for the search terms. For example, ~peanut butter might return links to nut butter and cashew butter.
• If you want to search only within a certain site, you can. Type your search terms, then site: and the name of the site, such as

  "English program" site:uoregon.edu

  You can also avoid hits from that site by using -site: in front of the name of the site.
• For academic searches, try Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)

Use quotation marks around phrases

I know I said this twice before, but it's one of the most useful things you can do. Remember, this will reduce the number of hits that you get, sometimes quite dramatically. If you are looking for "German vocabulary practice" in quotes, it will NOT necessarily find a website that has German Vocabulary as the title and Practice later in the page. It will first find pages that have all of the words inside the quotes in that exact order. So, "mountains in Oregon" is not the same as "Oregon mountains." If you're not getting what you want, think of another way to say it or delete the quotation marks.

A note about ads...

Just about every search engine has ads. The search engine gets paid by the number of people who click on a link to an advertiser's site. Google lets you know which of the links are ads - they call them "Sponsored Links," and they're often at the top or on the side of the page. Not everyone else does. If you click on an ad, you are more likely to get spam as a result. If you think you'd like to go to an advertised site, the better way is to copy the link (don't click on it) and paste it directly into a new window or new tab. You may still get spam, but it's a bit less likely that way.

Practice:

1. How would you search for information about mountain lions (also known as cougars) in Oregon?
   
   
2. How can you find previews of recent movies?
   
   
3. How would you look for a picture of Michael Jackson?
   
   
4. How would you find information about soccer but not American football?
   
   
5. How can you find out about the weather in Spain?

1. Search terms used:

Number correct/20 _________ Number incorrect/20 _________

2. Search terms used:

Number correct/20 _________ Number incorrect/20 _________

3. Search terms used:

Number correct/20 _________ Number incorrect/20 _________

4. Search terms used:

Number correct/20 _________ Number incorrect/20 _________

5. Search terms used:

Number correct/20 _________ Number incorrect/20 _________

Some suggested answers

See Other tech tips

If you have questions, comments, or for more information, contact Deborah Healey, dhealey AT uoregon DOT edu

https://www.deborahhealey.com/techtips/june2009.html
Last updated 26 June, 2009