When
you use a search engine, the more specific your input, in the form
of keywords, the fewer the results. Given the amount of information
out there, this is usually preferable.
Limiting your search
To find information before going on holiday to Turkey, you might enter
turkey in your search engine. However, this is likely to return
sites about the bird as well as the country. Ah, you think, I will
just enter Turkey, not turkey. You may find that there
are fewer results about the bird. However, most search engines disregard
capital letters, so the desired effect will not be achieved.
A more useful technique is to add keywords to narrow your search further.
Link your keywords with the + or AND operators. These operators narrow
your search to pages that contain all keywords.
Suppose you want to narrow your search about Turkey. To search for
pages that include information about hotels in Turkey, you can search
for hotels +turkey or hotels AND Turkey. This should
provide fairly accurate results, although it will also produce listings
of general sites that describe hotels in Turkey and other countries.
You can alleviate this by the NEAR or ADJ commands which work with
some engines. Therefore, hotels NEAR turkey or hotels ADJ
turkey will show pages where the two keywords are in close proximity
to each other.
You can filter words from your results with - or NOT. A search for
hotels AND turkey NOT ankara will disregard pages with information
about accommodation in the capital city.
Expanding your search
You can use the OR command to retrieve pages that include any of your
keywords. Combined with other commands, you can do some quite powerful
searches. By entering (hotels OR camping) AND turkey NOT ankara,
you can find out about hotels or camping sites outside of Ankara.
AND,
OR and NOT are known as Boolean operators. A useful graphic example
is at http://kathyschrock.net/rbs3k/boolean
Meta
Search Engines
In the first issue of Teacher Bytes, we examined the relative merits
of search engines. We omitted to mention metasearch engines. Metasearches
access many search engines simultaneously and so they do a lot of
the work for you. Copernic is a very useful example with many bells
and whistles. It also integrates nicely with your browser. Copernic
can be downloaded here. Surf Fast is
another metasearch engine. Try it by clicking
here. A third metaengine goes under the interesting name of www.dogpile.com.
With a little JavaScript, you can also create your own metasearch
engine for your webpage. Get the code from the Teacher Bytes site
here.
My thanks to Erika Mitchell and Albert Plucknett for their submissions
which helped to build this issue of Teacher Bytes.
