Finding things 3

Finding Things 3: Searching more effectively

Here is something rarely pointed out in search guides: practice makes you better. It just takes some experience to know of likely places to look for info, or how to phrase your queries, or how to evaluate hits, or what you can and can't expect to find.

Here are some other tips for power searching:

1. Use quotes.

Words with quotation marks around them must be found together. So "green beans" will only find documents with the tasty legume in them, while searching for green beans (no quotes) will also yield stories about the bean counters at the firm of Harrison and Green.

2. Use Boolean operators - AND, OR, NOT

Madonna AND child AND painting NOT music

3. Read Debbie Abilock's guide "Choose the best engine for your purpose"

This 2-page guide which isolates distinctive features in over a dozen search engines. Her work is at (http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~debbie/library/research/ adviceengine.html).

4. Use the power search options

There are too many of these to go into, but you should at least know this: most indexed search engines offer two or more methods of searching. Typically these allow you to add additional variables and control screen output. Have a look at the differences between Altavista's standard and advanced searches below.
Altavista standard - http://www.altavista.digital.com/
Altavista advanced search - http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq

5. Interpret addresses (URL's)

You can make some judgements about the potential appropriateness of a site and its loading speed by looking at its URL.
URLs which end in .com, .gov and .org represent businesses, governments, and organizations. They at least have a stake in producing accessible, finished sites. Examples:
www.ford.com
www.whitehouse.gov
www.lwv.org (can you guess this one?)

URL's which end in .edu are often for higher education. .edu pages that end with something that looks like a name or password are often student pages, but they may be faculty pages.
www.gmu.edu
mason.gmu.edu/~llmiller/

URL's with K-12 in them are, obviously, from K-12 schools.
www.fcps.k12.va.us/McLeanHS/bus.htm

URL's with country suffixes are typically outside the U.S. This can be both a disadvantage and an advantage, depending on the time of day.
www.monaco.mc/gforce/index.html
www.MongoliaOnline.mn/

Address with aol, compuserve, prodigy, geocities and tripod are all on large commercial providers. There is some incentive here for commercial providers to oversell their hardware resources, which can make their pages load slowly.
pages.prodigy.com/CA/rmkj08f/start.html
members.tripod.com/~FDI/archivemovies.html

6. Try using the web between late-night and noon

I've never verified this, but there often seems to be a slow-down on the net starting in the late morning, which would correspond to west coast users just getting in to the office while east coast users are still logged on. Things remain busy through the evening, as any AOL user will confirm.

7. Browser power tips

a. Don't wait for all the images to download.
b. Don't wait for files to download. Advanced browsers (Netscape and MSIE 3.x and up but not AOL's browser) allow you to surf to different pages after you start a file download without losing the download connection. You can even do multiple file downloads, though this does start to slow down system performance.
c. Open a new browser. Ctrl-N in Netscape will start a new browser. If a page is loading slowly and you want to look at other pages in the meantime, you can use the other browser.
Super-power tip: Right-click all links. If you want to read 15 stories from the newspaper, right click and open each link in 15 new windows.

d. Don't autoload images. If you are working on a slow machine or over a slow phone connection, it may be worth the trouble to only load images on command. This setting is available on every browser, but in different places.
e. Try your right mouse button. It does different things depending on the context, but it often offers a faster - or the only - way to do what you want. This is particularly true of frame-based pages.
Super-power tip: Right-click frame-based pages for printing and bookmarking. This is the only way you can bookmark a framed page - by getting it out of the frame.

f. Use smaller fonts for printing. All browsers have the option to change their display and print fonts. If you're printing a long document or a medium sized document in tables, you can save some paper and time by using a slightly smaller font. Note: IMO, Internet Explorer makes economical printing a bit easier than Netscape.

8. Go directly to your search engines - not to the "Search" button on your browser

The Search button takes you to the AOL, Netscape, or Microsoft search site, which (a) is busy, (b) has a lot of images, and (c) just links back out to the search engines. Eliminate the middle man and go directly to the search engine sites:
Yahoo - yahoo.com
Altavista - av.com
Ask Jeeves - ask.com
There are many others, of course.

9. Think of (a) distinctive phrases, and (b) synonyms

This is probably the second most important search skill (first is knowing where to look). However it is hard to teach. All I can say is this: words matter. Start searching with what you feel are the most distinctive words in a document - capitalized names of people, places, and things are often good. If you get absolutely nothing, try synonyms.

10. Use good search habits: (a) skim, don't read (b) make quick decisions on the utility of sites, and (c) bookmark often, (d) print things that look worth reading - but go to the bottom of the page first - that file may be 100 pages long!

These are also hard to teach, but they are worth noting. Generally speaking, you need to work a little quicker on the web to keep from getting totally bogged down. As for printing, it is proven that people read less well (i.e. more slowly) on a computer screen than on paper. You'll do your eyes a favor and save time too by printing your top pages - if your printer can handle it.

11. These often-touted features do not, in my opinion, make much of a difference in search accuracy:

a. Intelligent searching - Some sites such as Excite (http://www.excite.com) and Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) offer some form of intelligent searching. Excite, for example, will look for "elderly" in addition to "senior citizens" if given only the latter term. Both Excite and Infoseek allow you to re-do searches based on your best hits from a previous search - "Search for more sites like this one."
I have heard that people find these useful. I have not; these intelligent features seem more likely to induce garbage than to include something I've left out.

b. Meta-searching - There are sites such as Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) which send your request to several search engines and then compare the results. Again, some people apparently find these useful, but I feel that combining and averaging the distinctive results of several search engines is like mixing fried chicken and ice cream. Distinctively good things do not always mix to make something even better.

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