How to Do an Online Search

Did you ever wander aimlessly in the stacks of a large library trying to find a particular book? Frustrating isn’t it? You need to have a strategy to find the book you want in the shortest possible time. If you’ve gone on-line in the Internet, you probably recognize that using a search engine to find all the on-line references to a particular topic can drown you in information. Within seconds, you can have hundreds of thousands of references on your topic.

There are search engines and there are directories. Sometimes, a directory, like Yahoo or Looksmart, is more useful for a search than a search engine, like Google or Alta Vista. Directories divide their data base words into subject areas. Beginning with the main categories, the search directory branches into sub-categories and then into topics and subtopics. These can be especially valuable if you aren’t exactly sure what you want to find but you have a general idea. As you browse through the various topics, some may “click” with you. If you know what you want to find and can specify the key words, then a search engine may be the way to go. There are also meta-search engines where one engine sends the search to a number of search engines for you and in the correct format for each engine. Dogpile and MetaCrawler are two examples of meta-search engines. From the number of hits each engine gets, you can quickly determine which engines are best for your types of topics.

To begin using a search engine, plan your strategy:

1. Identify the main concepts in your topic.
2. Think of synonyms and alternate spellings for those concepts.
3. Get familiar with different search engines and directories.
4. (To compare features, you can go to a site, like http://home.sprintmail.com/~debflanagan/chart.html)
5. Use Boolean logic to narrow or broaden your search. If you don’t, then the engine will probably use either AND or OR automatically—it would be helpful to find out which your search engine does.
6. When you want more than one word to be searched, use either the plus sign or the word “AND,” depending on the search engine you are using and its expected format.
7. If you want a phrase to be searched for exactly as you type it, then use quotation marks around it.
8. If you put the most important keyword first in list of keywords, that will help influence the search to emphasize the word you feel is most important. You can put a plus sign in front of each word to be sure it is searched.
9. You can use an asterisk as a wildcard to broaden your search.
10. If you want the search to return results for either of two or more words, put parentheses around them with OR in between each.
11. It may be helpful to try to find out what “stop words” your engine is using. Each engine has its own list of such words that it will ignore during a search to make the search go faster.
12. Try not to use common words (unless you put them in quotes in a phrase) because you will get too many irrelevant hits.
13. Use three or more keywords in your search list.
14. Consider designing (or finding on the Web) a Treasure Hunt to give students a chance to practice their searching skills in a fun setting.
15. Go to a site like http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/bones.html for a short tutorial with further details on how to search the Web.

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