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Search the Web Successfully

Contents
 Introduction 
 About search services  
 Some common complaints 
 Improve your search results 

Introduction

OK. So you know how to surf the web, follow links, navigate backwards and forwards, mark pages you want to find again using bookmarks or favourites, and you've probably found more information than you know what to do with!

More often than not when you start up your browser you won't know the name of the site you need or you may have a particular topic in mind and want to explore a selection of sites.
What do you do then, when you want information on a specific topic and you want it to be relevant? Answer: use a search engine.

About Search Services on the Web

Search services are designed to help you find pages on topics of your choice. When you type in a keyword or keywords the search engine hunts through a compiled database for links based on your keywords.

There are numerous search services available on the web, I've listed some of the most popular at Useful Sites.

There are two main types of service available - directory and search engine. The two differ primarily in construction - directories are compiled by people, search engines gather their information using programmes and algorithms known as "bots" or "crawlers".

A few of the the most popular search services are: Alta Vista and the UK focussed siteAlta Vista UK (search engines) and Yahoo UK, Excite UK (directories).

Enter a keyword or keywords on your specific topic in the search box. When you use lowercase letters most search engines will find both upper and lowercase results. If you use uppercase text some search engines will find only exact matches.

The search engine will return a list of links, often running into thousands, with the first 10 or 20 or so displayed. You can scroll through the list and view subsequent pages using the page numbers or Next buttons provided beneath the search results.

Different search engines will return varying results even when using the same search keywords and terms so trying them out individually may produce the results you need.  

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Some common complaints

"I don't know what keywords to use."

"There are thousands of results from my search."

"Most of this stuff is nothing to do with my topic."

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Improve your search results

  • Plan your search before you start.
  • Make sure you choose keywords carefully, thinking about words that describe your topic effectively.
  • Think about other words that might also describe your topic.
  • Try using broader or narrower terms.
  • Things that might affect your search results are plurals, capitalisation and US spellings.
  • Using + and - characters will help to bring make the results more relevant to your topic. For example:
    • +Lincoln +cathedral will force only pages containing both words to appear.
    • +Lincoln -cars will bring back pages with the word Lincoln in them but not those that also include the word car.
    • +cathedral +Lincoln -Abraham will bring back pages containing both Lincoln and cathedral and will exclude any containing Abraham.
  • You can group a phrase so that only pages containing the precise phrase will be returned: "stress management".
  • You can use an asterisk, known as a wild card symbol: garden* will cover garden, gardens, gardener, gardeners, gardening.
Since search engines differ when dealing with search terms the results might not be what you expected. If this happens it might be worth a look at the help pages provided at their sites to see which of the search features they support.

All of those given above should work on most of the popular search engines. 

A very useful search site is Ask Jeeves Here you can type in a complete sentence for your search. The Ask Jeeves site will also return details of information returned by other search engines. 

Remember: 

Anyone with a network connection can create and load web pages. Be discerning about the material you see. 

AND

Material accessed via the web is subject to the laws of copyright, check out the permissions on the page and always: 

If you use it, footnote it.

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Happy hunting!

PGCE History - 2000  | Home

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Produced by Sue Holland
January 2001