Internet Search Tips and Strategies

General Search Tips

1. Use several search tools. Because of the constant indexing that search sites do, and because of the way their indexes work, some will find content that others will not. No engine has the entire Web indexed. Use several engines and several directories, and look at reference and targeted engines as well for the most thorough search. (And remember the Invisible Web!).

2. Read the search tips or help information at each search engine. You will learn how to perform more sophisticated searches, how to restrict or expand searches, and how to use the site more efficiently. For example, AltaVista, Excite, and InfoSeek allow the use of quotation marks to create an exact phrase search, a plus sign to indicate a word that must occur to yield a hit page, and a minus sign to exclude pages that include the word. By combining these items, you can create a very powerful and specific search: "lesson plans" +K-12 -science tells the engine to search for the exact phrase lesson plans (rather than just the two words anywhere in the document, on pages that must include the term K-12 and that must not include the word science.

3. For keyword searches, use several words. If you type in a general topic word as if you were looking through a card catalog, you are likely to receive tens or even hundreds of thousands of hits. A search for "insomnia," for example, will return more than 20,000 hits from one engine. You might try a search on "causes insomnia cure better sleep sleepless" or something similar. Try to imagine what words might occur in an article you want and type in several of those words. Use synonyms, too. Alternatively, use an exact phrase search on "treatment of insomnia" or a directory search, starting with the subject Health or Lifestyle. Note that you can combine various phrases into one search to improve your yield. If you are researching apple growing, you might combine several phrases from different places on the ladder of generalization and type in fruit tree apple farming growing Washington Red Delicious orchards Gala Fuji Granny Smith and see what you get.

4. Guess a location. The address or URL (uniform resource locator) of a web site is, surprisingly, often guessable. Many companies use a standard form of URL, which is http://www.companynamehere.com, where "companynamehere" is the name of the company. Thus, for example, Sony is found at http://www.sony.com and you can figure out how to get to Disney, Honda, and NBC the same way. Companies with long names often abbreviate them in some guessable way, as for example http://www.nytimes.com is the New York Times, and the standard form with "adage" in the middle will bring up Advertising Age and with "popsci" in the middle will get you Popular Science.

Moreover, that middle word is often the key to a site's content even when not identifying a famous company. What, for example, do you think you would find at http://www.fraud.com or http://www.weather.com? Try the standard form with "salami" or even "search" and see what happens. Try a few of your own areas, based on a topic (like news) an item (like a fruit), or a place.

5. Back up to find out where you are. When you click on a hit from a search engine, you are connected directly to the page where the search terms were matched. It is not always clear exactly where you have arrived. You may see something like, "Chapter 5: The Triumph of Palladian Architecture." Who wrote this? What is the book about, of which this is Chapter 5? To answer these questions, look at the URL (address) you have connected to. If may look something like this: http://www.some.edu/faculty/jones/architec/ch5.htm. The page you are reading is the lowest level of a series of directories beginning with the web site (www.some.edu), dropping to a "faculty" directory, then to a "jones" directory, and so on. To learn more about the context of your Chapter 5, go to the right end of the URL and chop off the "ch5.htm" and then press return. This will have the effect of backing you up one level in the hierarchy and you can see what the higher directory ("architec" in this case) is all about. You might find a book title, author, or other information. Now chop off the "architec" directory and back up to "jones" to see what is there. Back up as far as you want or need to in order to find out the information you need about the work and its author.

If you are doing research for a report or project, be sure to write down the URL and all pertinent information so that you can cite the source properly. (See below for example citation style for this page.) If you print directly from your browser, the URL will be printed for you in an upper or lower corner. But if you save the page to disk, the URL will not be included, so be sure to copy it down.

Lifesaver tip: If you accidentally neglect to write down the URL, but have a printed or disk copy of the article, you can either see the URL printed at the top of the page or you can use a search engine to locate the article for you again. To do this, type in from the article a four or five-word phrase that contains the most unusual words you can find. Then perform an exact phrase search for these words. The engine will almost always take you right to the article.