| Mr. Keisling |
Writing in the PC Novice Guide to the Web (PC Novice Information 1-800-424-7900), Michael Cahlin has made a list of suggestions for increasing the effectiveness of your searches on the web. They are reprinted here by permission.
Learn the Art. Learning how to pose the right questions is a learned art, explains McKinley's Maxwell. Nobody gets it right away. Just remember to be as specific as possible. Avoid generic or commonly used words. "Baseball" is too broad and bound to deliver many hits; "1960 World Series" is better. "The best queries consist of terms, words, or phrases that can only be found in the documents you want," Maxwell says.What's the good word? Before you start, make a list of keywords. Use your thesaurus. " Be prepared to try your search more than once, adding and subtracting search terms to help you refine your results, " Lycos' Garnsey says.
Link search terms. Most search engines let you add connectors such as "and," "or," or "minus" (-), as well as search for phrases such as "knowledge is power" using quotes. (These are called Boolean searches, named after British mathematician George Boole.) For example, " Mickey Mantle and World Series" only delivers information on both topics. The word "or" (instead of "and") would direct the search to one topic or the other. The minus sign tells the search engine to find records that contain " Mickey Mantle" but not "World Series." Naturally these connectors vary slightly between search engines, so read the fine print.
Get help. If you're having trouble finding the information or looking for tips on how to conduct more advance Boolean searches, point your browser to each search engine's Help selection. For example, on WebCrawler, that would be http://webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Help/advanced.html. If you need help conducting an Internet search the volunteer staff at the Internet Public Library Reference Center (http//ipl.sils.umich.edu/ref/) will answer questions posted at its Web Site...eventually. Responses currently take about a week.
Check the ratings. Don't panic if your search engine finds hundreds (or thousands) of documents. Most only show 10 or 25 at a time. Also, each engine has some type of ranking system so that the sites most closely matching your criteria appear at the top of the list. Most engines also can be configured to only return sites that have been reviewed or are in some type of "Best Of" category.
Similar sites. Most search engines provide some type of hyperlink to "similar sites," says Rob Wilen, director at WebCrawler. For example, WebCrawler has a Similar Pages option that provides links to places that fall in the same category as your search, though it doesn't necessarily match any of your search criteria.
Try again. Most searches should take no longer than 30 seconds, though Halverson admits to getting antsy after only 10 seconds. If you feel you've waited too long, click Stop, then Reload. The 'Net is not perfect. Sometimes a site is too popular. Sometimes a server is slow, is down, or has a limited number of incoming lines. Sometimes the Web just hiccups. Remember the heaviest Web traffic--and therefore the slowest searches--take place during regular business hours. If you find your searches bogging down for no good reason, sometimes the best solution is to get offline and reboot your system.
Spelling counts. Always double-check spelling before conducting a search. A misspelled or mistyped word will derail any well defined search.
Make a case out of it. Punctuation and capitalization count, too (although this is getting to be less of a problem). Search engines and browsers, in general, are very unforgiving. If the site your looking for is http://www.TheCyberMom.com/, and you type http://www.thecybermom.com, you won't find it.
Type shorter names. When looking for search engines, both Navigator and Internet Explorer can be configured to save keystrokes. In the Navigator 2.0 or newer, just type a single word--yahoo, for example--and the program automatically adds the "http://www" prefix and suffix ".com". Internet Explorer 2.0 or later will only add the "http://".
No sights, no sounds. Turn off your graphics and sounds. Sure they're cool, but they take forever to load (This can be VERY helpful if you are working over a slow connection, like a modem). You can make text-only loading the default in both Navigator and Internet Explorer. After reviewing the site, you always can go back and turn on the features.
Chop down. If you're having trouble logging onto a page with a long URL, such as the government's Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs site at http://www-nmd.usgs.gov/mac/isb/pubs/factsheets/fs09096.html, try deleting everything after the .COM (or .EDU, .GOV., .NET, .ORG, and so on). You'll wind up at a home page, and then (hopefully) you can link to your original destination.
Guess the address. Things change, especially on the Web. Sites switch servers, change their names, or just go belly-up. In most cases, the old location will point you to the new direction. If not, take an educated guess. Try the company's name or product. Sometimes even the topic might work. For example, to find Netscape Navigator, type http://www.netscape.com.
Multiplicity. Instead of looking through one search engine at a time, another way to save time is by searching through several engines at once. MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) not only employs eight search engines but even tries to get rid of any duplicate sites it finds. Search.com (http://www.search.com), launched by c|net, looks through popular search engines plus up to 250 search engines and tools all over the Internet. After sending your request to two or three of 17 search engines, Savvy Search (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~dreiling/smartform.html) compiles results into a single list.
Assigned activity for this lesson