1. ETT 429 Spring 2007 WWW & Searching

2. Web Searching Strategies Lecture adopted from Dr. Barbara Fiehn

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

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

5. 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

6. 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

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

8. 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.

9. AND

10. OR

11. NOT

12. 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

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

14. 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).

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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)

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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”

21. 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”

22. Choose the Best Search for your Information Need http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacie s/information/5locate/adviceengine.html