Cynthia Vaskis

SLM521 Spring 2004

Search Tips Assignment

4/20/04

File: e4srtips.htm

Search Tips Elective Assignment

 

Introduction to the Search Tips List

 

The first section below contains a list of searching tips that, if followed, can reduce your efforts and time to find what you want.  The next section is has two Problem Scenarios that take you through using the tips and after that is the Tips Brochure or the abbreviated Tips explanation list.  A few additional problems are listed for the student to try their skills using these tips as well. 

 

The tips below should help improve and narrow the results from your searches.

 

Tips List and Explanations

 

Tip 1.  Select the type of search engine that matches the type of data you are looking for.  Some are better for general knowledge broad coverage searches (General or Meta-Search engines) and some require specific information from the person doing the search (some Publishers or News engines) before the search can be done (such as the time frame in which you want to search and what source, as a magazine or newspaper, you want to search to use).  I found that the specific ones were more useful when you have a particular item to find and you knew at least part of its name.  Some of the Medical or Education search engines don’t let you enter a query.  They have all of their information organized in lists for you to browse.  If you know what category your information is in, then it is probably easy to find it, but in general, a user will not know what type of disease or medical term is used for their symptoms and would want a query line.  Some Publisher search engines require an author’s name or article or book title to search.  If you already have something in mind that you are looking for then these can be helpful.  But if you don’t know what you are looking for, these engines are way too specific in the way that they set their boundaries for searching.  You would not get back as many returns as the general search engine.

 

Test the tip “use the right type of search engine for the type of query” by following this procedure:

 

  1. Pick a search word that relates to one of the special types of search engines such as the Medical one.  Try “heart murmur” and query a medical search engine such as www.healthweb.org .  You should get several responses back.  Now try that word in one of specialized News search engines as www.voanews.com.   The Medical engine will return information about what a heart murmur is and research about it.  The News engine didn’t return anything because it is looking for whether anyone in the news was described having a heart murmur and no one was found.  The two engines are searching for different types of data related to the query.  So match your query with the type of data your search engine is searching for in its database.  The real problem is that the two types of search engines have two very different types of data stored in their search engines.  The Medical has a dictionary and explanations for medical terms.  The News database contains people and information that is in the News broadcasts.

 

  1. Try another type of query such as looking for a published book by its title.  Try the titles name in the search engine www.publist.com and then try the name in a general search engine as www.google.com.  If the book is not a popular item recently (last few years) it may not show up in the general search engine but it probably would in the Publisher’s search engine.

 

Tip 2.  Formulate your query to be as narrow in scope as possible to get the best results.   Try as many descriptive words in your query as possible to narrow the search results.  Use the search engines ability to combine words in a search with AND, OR or NOT AND conjunctions between your search words or whatever tool they have that does the same thing such as plus signs before each word in the query.  Some Advanced features of search engines have pre-canned lines where you can type in the individual words and they add the conjunctions for you.   Some search engines have English words to describe the “math” (AND, OR, NOT AND) of combining query words.  You can also use quotes to find an exact match or NEAR to find words in close proximity on the page to each other but most search engines already do that.

 

Tip 3.  If you know it, give the time frame when you think the information was published. If you are using a search engine that has a specific purpose, such as News or Publishers List, you must know the time frame in which to search for results and sometimes you also need to specify where the engine searches for results. I found that the general search engines were good to get broad coverage of news from any time period but then the results could be quite old and you may not notice it thinking it was recent.  News search engines could look within a certain time frame and within a selected media (newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, television reports, etc.).

 

Tip 4.  Several search engines offer special search features such as video, TV, radio, or newspaper as a source for the search engine.  Instead of doing a general search, be more specific in defining what type of source database should be used in the search.  Select a search engine that searches the specific format of the information you want such as books, news, videos, radio or television broadcasts, music databases, games, etc. so you don’t waste time with an engine that can’t give you the results.

 

Tip 5.  Use the search feature that lets you specify “where” in the result listing’s information the query words should be found.  Tell the search engine where to look in the listing’s text data such as in the listing’s main text body, in its URL, in the description associated with the article or in the web site’s name or description.  Publisher’s use this feature to find specific articles that have certain words in their titles.

 

Tip 6.  Try to exclude pages from the search engine results that have certain words or phrases on them.  You can select “certain” words to exclude by using the AND NOT function or the minus sign in front of those words or quoted phrases in the query statement.

 

Tip 7. Use the organized results categories listed at the bottom of the page (as in www.Vivisimo.com) after a query is performed to narrow the search even more by looking at those in a subcategory.  This feature can be very useful since some Meta search engines return a lot of selections found across a lot of databases.  These categories narrow the general topic into subtopics for you.

 

Instructional Activity

 

The students are to follow the two scenario problems below using the Tip strategy laid out for each Tip (First Tip, Second Tip, etc) to see how their search results can improve.  At the end of this section there is a Tips Brochure and some additional search problems that the students can try.

 

Problem Scenario One: You are to find the latest news report on President Bush’s plans for robots in future missions to the Moon. 

 

Follow through this example to see how these tips can make a difference in your search results.

 

First Tip – Select an appropriate search engines based upon the type of data they store in their databases and the query’s subject matter or topic.  The suggested ones would probably first be a general or Meta search engine. 

 

Second Tip - Use key words in your search such as Bush Moon robots future in several general or Meta search engines and use the AND or OR conjunctions until you get some responses. Try some general www.google.com or Meta engines as www.vivisimo.com or www.dogpile.com or www.altavista.com .

 

Third Tip – Once you get some results, look at the time frame and do another query with the same words but select a period of time around the good initial results dates.

Some general or Meta engines allow time frame selection.  Then if no better results are found, use a News search engine to narrow the search.  The specialized News engines sometimes require you to enter a time frame such as www.voanews.com  or www.newsdirectory.com.

 

You may want to query the general ones to find the time frame when this topic was last mentioned in the News and then switch over to a News search engine that allows you to narrow the time frame for the search and select a particular news media such as radio, TV, magazines or newspapers.  You can look for President Bush’s name in the title in some News engines which you could combine with the word Moon or robots.

 

Fourth Tip – Use the specialized News search engines to locate news about Bush and the Moon as reported on the TV news or radio as well as large newspapers such as the New York Times or the Baltimore Sun.

 

Fifth Tip – Use the publication search engines to allow you to search for the query words in its article titles.

 

Sixth Tip – Use the AND NOT or minus sign symbol to exclude unwanted reports that have a common word in them.

 

Seventh Tip – The Meta search engines further narrow the results by listing them in categories at the bottom of the results listing page.  Look only at the results in the categories that apply to the data you want to find.

 

Problem Scenario Two:  Use a specialized search engine, such as a Medical one, to match the type of data query.  The problem is to find the latest research on the “West Nile virus”.

 

First Tip – You can search for this topic in a general search engine but the real research information will be found in medical journals accessed by specialized Medical search engines.  You need to know what type of data is accessed by a search engine to help you search the right type of databases.

 

Second Tip – Use key words to narrow the search and be careful about case sensitivity.   I found that the Medical search engines can be case sensitive.  I think this is because some of their data has proper names associated with it which are capitalized.  For example, to use the phrase “west nile virus” returned no results but when the query was “West Nile virus” good results were returned.  When I used the web site www.nursefriendly.com/medicine/  it called up www.kfinder.com/newweb/ to look in journals, books, newspapers, encyclopedias, and magazines for related articles.  The www.achoo.com/main.asp search engine uses another search engine called “NCBI_PubMed” (underscore indicates a space but is actually not in the name itself).

 

Third Tip - If you are only interested in recent news reports on the topic then use a recent time frame to do the search.  If you find an article that was published on a date, then search around that data for others since the Medical field tends to publish a lot when a topic is “hot” or in the public’s current interest.  A public concern recently was “smallpox being used by terrorists” so search the medical journals around the time of the public scare about smallpox.

 

Fourth Tip – Be more selective about the sources you are searching to narrow the results.  You might want to search some well known Medical journals instead of the total volume of medical information.  You may want to try some News search engines for latest news on current medical issues which also offer access to recent radio and TV broadcasts on the subject as well.

 

Fifth Tip – If you can specify where to search for the data in the article, such as in the title or the main body of text or in the URL, use that to narrow the results.

 

Sixth Tip – You may want to exclude pages that might have one of your search words because you got misleading results or use quotes to get the exact phrasing of the query words which will exclude the engine finding only one of the word in the text.

 

Seventh Tip – The medical search engines don’t usually organize the returned results but they can point you to some medical journal web sites mentioned below the article listings.  Then you could narrow your search within a Journal’s archive of reports.

 

Tips Brochure

 

Tip 1 - Match the query topic with the type of data used by that search engine.

 

Tip 2 - Select key words to narrow the search and use conjunctions when needed.

(Use the AND, OR, or NOT AND (to exclude words from the results) or the plus + and minus - signs used to include or exclude the words they precede from the search query’s results).

 

Tip 3 - Narrow the time frame in which to search for results if known (do a general search to find the approximate time frame for initial results)

 

Tip 4 - Use a specialized search engine with special ways to narrow the source databases that will be searched to match the query’s topic.

 

Tip 5 - Use special query choices that specify where your query words should be found in the text, title, entry description, or URL for a matching result from the search process.

 

Tip 6 - Use the NOT AND or the minus sign preceding a query word to exclude pages found with that word on them from the search results.

 

Tip 7 – Use any categorization of query results to select a subgroup to search through.

 

Additional Problem Searches to Try with the Tips List

 

1. Find out whether “mad cow disease” is a current problem in the United States.  My tries came back with just “disease” or just “cow” in the United States but when I found a Medical search engine in England called UK Health Centre (www.healthcentre.org.uk/hc/index.html) where they had a lot of trouble with that disease, there were many medical reports.  The News search engines allow you to look in other countries for their news which might have been helpful in this case.

 

2. Find out personal information about George Huff from the American Idol TV show.  Use a query like “American Idol TV show George Huff”.  I used the specialized News engines as www.newsdirectory.com or www.voanews.com  which returned no results.  When I used the more general news engines such as http://news.yahoo.com  or www.cnn.com  or http://news.google.com  there were a lot of results on the show but not that much on George Huff himself.  The results would have been better if I had just used a general or Meta search engine.

 

The Evaluation

 

The evaluation of the students trying these tips will be if they learn how to use the results from each tip to further narrow the next search in order to answer the question posed.  It may take some practice at using the conjunctions to narrow the search such as using the minus sign to not include web pages that have that word on it.  An example is searching for the query “Colorado River explorer Powell”.  Some searches came back with news about Colin Powell, not the explorer John Wesley Powell.  In this case the minus sign in front of the word “Colin” would have solved that problem by excluding pages with that word on it.  Another solution would be to use “John Wesley Powell” to be more specific in the query in order to narrow the search instead of just using “Powell”.

 

The success of the student will be noted if the search results returned are relevant to the initial query topic and are useful enough to satisfy the initial question from which the query was derived.

 

Conclusion

 

Try variations on the tips above as combining the way to specify the query (with conjunctions or as an exact quoted phrase) along with using time frames when possible.  Be as specific as you can about the information you want and about the sources you want to search so that your results will improve to answer the original question.