Robbins Library Notes

This week’s installment of Searching 101 will give a high-level overview of online search engines, like Yahoo! and Google.

Online search engines are useful research tools, but they need to be used wisely and intelligently if they are to be effective.

My late reference professor at Simmons compared Internet searching to fishing for bass in a large lake. He equated “blind” searching–his phrase for entering in terms willy-nilly, without putting thought into constructing a search or knowing the quirks of a particular search engine–with getting to the lake, and having no idea where the bass hang out, what time of day they feed, what habits they have, what sort of bait they take, etc. You could indeed cast your line out into the water, with no preparation, and you may even reel in a bass on your first attempt, but it’s not likely. But, if you know how to set up your search, the quirks of the search engine (i.e., how and what it searches), where information is, and the like, your chances of reeling in that prize-winning bass grow exponentially.

So, how do you use Internet search engines wisely and intelligently? There are several things that you can do to reel in the prize fish, and leave the old tires and boots at the bottom of the proverbial cyber-lake:

Advanced searching

As with databases, use the Advanced Search functionality as your default search. You’ll usually be able to do much more focused searching and apply limiters. With Google, for example, you can exclude words and phrases, increase the number of results on a page, look for specific file formats (e.g., Word, PDF, or PowerPoint), and so on.

Checking beyond the first 20 hits

How many people ever look beyond the results of the first search screen (usually set at a default 10-20 results)? How many even look beyond the first four or five without scrolling down to see the rest? I once remember seeing a study several years ago (which I cannot now locate) that suggested that, on average, people generally return less than one useful result per online search, in part because they never look beyond the first 20 hits of their search.

There are many reasons why potentially useful items do not appear in the highest rankings of a search. Sometimes, it depends on the vagaries of the particular search engine’s search algorithm, and their set-up is not always clear to end-users.

How items are ranked in a search engine is also an issue. We’ll talk more about this below.

Remember that the search engine can’t read your mind — what you consider relevant may not be to the search engine’s algorithm. Thus, it pays to look beyond the first 20 or so hits, to see if a relevant item is lower down on the list than you might have expected it to be.

Comprehensiveness

No one search engine covers the whole of the Internet. If you’re not finding something on Google, for example, trying using Yahoo! or Ask.com to see if they have the information.

There are a lot of search engines from which to choose. Searchenginewatch.com follows many of them, though you will have to register and pay for access to see their complete listings.

Quirks

Know the quirks of a search engine, and get familiar with its quirks and functionality. Searchenginewatch.com is a good place to learn more about this, although they seem to have moved a lot of this content into a subscriber-only area, and seem to be focusing more on content for Web designers and advertisers than in the past.

Quotation Marks

This tip is especially useful for Google users: if you go to the Google basic search, and enter in two or more words, Google’s default is to treat the words as being part of a Boolean search string. So, entering in, for example, “social” and “justice,” will be treated by Google as “social AND justice.” You will return results with the words social and justice on the same page, but not necessarily next to each other. If you want to search the two words as a phrase, enclose them in quotation marks.

Using quotations marks is also helpful if you are looking for quotes and citations, to limit searches to the exact words and phrases for which you’re looking.

Ranking

Money talks, as the old cliché begins, and it’s just as true in the virtual realm as in the physical one. Some search engines will allow sites indexed in their system to pay to be ranked higher than others. For others, the search algorithm will do the ranking, and it’s not always clear how exactly this ranking process works. So, if the ranking of your search results seems a bit odd, it could be the result of some behind-the-scenes issues. It’s also another reason why it pays to look beyond the first 20 results of your search, to see if a prize bass is lurking in the deeper waters farther out.

Summary

Using search engines intelligently and wisely is no different from using databases intelligently and wisely. Know their quirks, idiosyncrasies, ranking process, and tricks, set up your search thoughtfully, and, instead of making a bass of yourself with irrelevant results, you’ll be bringing home a prize catch of winning research materials.

For Further Reading

You can find many places online and in print about how to become a better Internet/Web searcher. Here are three to get you started:

• Internet Public Library: Web Searching
• Searchenginewatch.com’s Web Searching Facts
• Super Searchers Books – most of these are business-related books, but there are a few basic and generic books that may be of interest.

Next week’s Search 101 installment will look at critically evaluating resources.