a Carolina Global School House workshop
Web Directories
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Search Engines
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Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com Yahooligans CCRN NET VR-USA E-Map |
Alta Vista http://www.altavista.digital.com Excite Hotbot HumanSearch InfoSeek Lycos News Hunt Open Text WebCrawler |
Some Web Search Resources
An extensive list of web directories: | http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searching_the_Web/Web_Directories/ |
An extensive list of search engines: | http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searching_the_Web/Search_Engines/ |
Comparison Chart: | http://www.kcpl.lib.mo.us/search/chart.htm |
Reviews of prominent search engines: | http://www.kcpl.lib.mo.us/search/srchengines.htm |
Search Engine Watch, service that keeps track of Internet search engines: | http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ |
Search Engine Glossary
Boolean search | A search where connectors such as AND, NOT and OR are used to include and exclude pages based on certain words. |
Full-text index | A search engine index that includes every word in the web pages that it represents. |
Index | The searchable database of records, each representing Internet documents. The database is created by search engine programs called spiders or crawler. Index is often used as a synonym for search engine. |
Keyword search | A search of an index based for words specified by the user. |
Phrase search | A search for documents containing an exact sentence or phrase specified by a user. Phrases are usually enclosed in quotation marks. |
Search Engine | An Internet search tool that consists of a web page, a program for search an index, the index (database) which represents a sizable part of the Internet, and spider or crawler programs that find new resources and adds them to the index. |
Spider | The software that scans documents and adds them to an index by following links. Spiders programs are sometimes called crawlers.. |
Stemming | The ability for a search to include the "stem" of words. For example, stemming allows a user to enter "swimming" and get back results also for the stem word "swim." |
Speaking BOOLEAN |
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George Boole, a 19th century mathematician. Boolean searching is a way of defining to search engines and other search tools, the information that you seek. It provides a way of including relevant topics and excluding irrelevant topics, filtering out unwanted information. |
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Topic | Description | Example |
AND | "AND" is a connector. It requires that all hits (web pages that fullfil the search criteria) must have both keywords connected by the "AND". This connector tends to decrease the number of hits. | Bulls AND Basketball Both "Bulls" and "Basketball" |
OR | "OR" is also a connector. It requires that either of the connected keywords be present in the hits...or both. This connector tends to increase the number of hits. | earthquake OR seismology This search will select web pages |
NOT | "NOT" preceeds keywords that must not appear in selected web pages. This connector tends to decrease the number of hits. | earthquake NOT engineer This search will select web |
Quotes ("") | Quotes are used to define phrases. Keywords that are enclosed in quotes will searched as they appear in the quotes. This technique is good for finding specific titles of documents, such as "The Declaration of Independence" | "William
Shakespeare" This will search for pages
with |
Parentheses | The parentheses defines the order for keywords. Relationships or phrases enclosed within parentheses will be tested before relations outside of parentheses. Think, algebra! | (earthquake AND recent)
NOT (engineer OR candy) This search will first
find pages with |
SEARCH
A Process for searching the Internet
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tart with a small database search tool --
Yahoo Conduct this search to get a grasp on the types of resources that a available on the Internet. Yahoo will give you a very good representation. This gives you a chance to identify both the good and bad hits you will be getting and a chance to identify the keywords that are common to both the good and bad hits, both equally valuable. |
E |
dit search phrase as a result Create a boolean search expression from the common words discovered in your Yahoo search. Ex: (Earthquake OR seismology) NOT (engineer OR prediction OR individual) |
A |
dvance into a large database search engine --
Altavista or Excite Use your edited search expression on a large database such as Alta Vista or Excite. |
R |
efine search phrase Again, examine the good and bad hits, identify more key words and incorporte them in your search expression...refine your search phrase. |
C |
ycle back and Advance again Pretty clear! |
H |
arvest resources Good Luck! |