ETT 229 Fall 2004 WWW & Searching

Agenda  11:00-11:05 – Quiz 13  11:05-11:45 – Lecture  11:45-12:15 – Application

Web Searching Strategies Lecture adopted from Dr. Barbara Fiehn

Strategy Tips  Preplan searches  Learn strategies  Learn the search engine  Use advanced search screens

Search Planning  Formulate the research question  Identify concepts in the question  Identify search terms/describe concepts  Consider synonyms and variations of those terms

Search With Peripheral Vision  Look for more specific terms  Collect synonyms, alternative terms  Agency or institution or other source?  Don’t assume you know what you’re looking for Strategies for art theft prevention “stolen art” prevention STOP, Interpol Lyon, other agencies CoPAT, object-id, other agencies

Key Words n Single Word Finds all occurrences unless an indexing field is selected n High change of irrelevant hits n Choose key words carefully n Uniqueness / Proper nouns Results in large number of hits Not particularly specific

Phrases  If you have two or more words adjacent in a phrase, use quotation marks to group  Usually get better results than keyword  “ violent juveniles”

Boolean  Logical operations used to combine search terms  Frequent connectors ANDORNOT  Also ADJACENT, NEAR and FOLLOWED BY  Most search engines require Boolean terms in all CAPS.

AND

OR

NOT

Plus - Minus  Like AND / NOT  + sign to require a search term be present  - sign to exclude a term from a search +dogs -pets  Not as commonly used as Boolean

Advanced Searches  Wild Card  Relevance Ranking  Nested Searches  Case, Link, Title

Wild Card / Truncation  Retrieve variant spellings (eg. color, colour)  Words with a common root (eg. psychology, psychological, psychologist, psychologists, etc.).  Most common are *, #, and ?  Right only truncation (eg. psycholog*), or middle truncation (eg. colo*r).

Relevance Ranking  Algorithm to rank retrieved documents in order of decreasing relevance.  Browse only first few pages of results.  Searcher determined "importance", "more like this“ Whittlebit Google WhittlebitGoogle

Relevance Algorithm  Number of times the search terms appear in the document  Location of the search terms in the document (eg. title produces a higher ranking than same word in the body of another document)  Proximity of search terms to one another in a document

Nested Searches  (bread +butter) AND (pudding -sandwich)  police AND (interview OR biography)  journalist AND (international OR foreign)  atlas and anatomy AND (color or colour)  stonewall NOT (Jackson OR war)  Lincoln AND Illinois NOT (abe OR abraham)

Case, Link  Use lower case and singular form  Good site? link: and URL to find other pages that have linked to this site Link: whittlebit.com

Limiting search by field  single site site:whitehouse.gov “presidential pets”  web domain site:org forestry California “genetically modified organisms” site:edu OR site:gov

Page Title, URL, File Format  Force a search only for page titles use title: and descriptive word title: elephant  file format filetype:pdf  Language, page updated  Use commands or “Advanced Search”

Finding “expert pages” and searchable databases Google: genome database “cell biology” directory  Society pages with collections of links Google: genome society results in “International mammalian genome society”

Choose the Best Search for your Information Need s/information/5locate/adviceengine.html

Practice  Pick a research topic (school related) and go to a search engine (choose any from the list)  Read the Advanced Search Help and Tips page (every search engine has one)  Practice doing some searches using advanced options such as Boolean, file type, domain type, etc.  For each practice, browse the first three hits given in the engine – in a Word document, write a journal of your searching (what worked/what didn’t)  After you have done several searches using these methods and written about them, go to WebBoard and post your journal entry in the “Web Searching” discussion board  Do not rush this assignment

Now and Later