September 2005 — EduNet
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The Art of Effective Web Searching
Six advanced search techniques that will help you find the best results faster.
The ubiquitous Web search form (the
“search command line”) has had a
profound and transformative effect
on information retrieval. That simple little
box at the top of every search engine has
opened up a boundless new world for
millions of people. In doing so, all of the
major search engines have made compromises
to cast their nets wide and broaden
their overall appeal. While this has done
wonders to build a general-purpose tool for
the majority, there are specific things that
we can do to unlock the secrets buried
beneath the search command line.
The major search engines tend to return particularly accurate and relevant results for two very different types of queries. On one hand, a search for terms that are common but rather specific will usually return an accurate list of popular Web sites that contain canonical information about the term(s). At the other extreme, a search for a relatively rare and statistically improbable set of search terms also tends to return accurate results. For example, a search for “ISBN 0679723420” points you straight to Vladimir Nabokov’s classic Pale Fire, without much effort.
Therefore, the art of effective searching usually falls somewhere in the middle of those two kinds of queries. This is especially applicable in the academic and technical communities, where users frequently seek out esoteric and difficult-to-articulate data. While the search engines are getting better at helping the user with these more demanding queries, here are six techniques the power user can adopt to find the best results fast:
Search from the outside in. Sometimes search queries simply return too much information, especially when the search engine d'esn’t know enough to disambiguate between different types of results. The first approach most people try is to add more terms to the query until the right results are found. But this can just as easily eliminate good results as reveal them. An alternative is to start with broad search terms and use the “minus” operator in the search query to selectively eliminate sets of results. This lets the power user quickly scan through the list of results and subtract entire categories of pages with quick modifications to the query, ending up with only the desired matches.
Comparison search. The Web is so large, no single search engine can crawl more than a fraction of it. Also, each search engine’s relevancy algorithms (i.e., the logic that determines the order of the search results) differ substantially. The solution is to keep bookmarks handy for the big engines such as Google (www.google.com), Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), and MSN (www.msn.com), and be prepared to check all of them on particularly challenging searches.
