In most cases, an effective search strategy, the correct use of Boolean logic, and familiarity with the features of each of the search engines will lead to satisfactory results. However, there are additional techniques that may further improve your results in particular circumstances. The following search tips apply to one or more of the search engines discussed in this workshop.
| The Find button: After following a link to a document retrieved with a search engine, it is sometimes not immediately apparent why the document has been retrieved. This may be because the words for which you searched appear near the bottom of the document. A quick method of finding the relevant words is to click on your web browser's Find button to search for the text in the current document. |
| Bookmark your results: If you are likely to want to repeat a search at a later date, add a bookmark to your current search results. |
| Right truncation of URLs: Often, a search will retrieve links to many documents at one site. For example, searching for "Okanagan University College Library" will retrieve not only the OUC Library home page (http://www.ouc.bc.ca/libr), but also any pages that contain the phrase "Okanagan University College Library", whether or not they are linked to the home page (eg. this page - http://www.ouc.bc.ca/libr/connect96/search.htm). Rather than clicking on each URL in succession to find the desired document, truncate the URL at the point at which it appears most likely to represent the document you are seeking and type this URL in the Location box of your web browser. |
| Guessing URLs: Basic knowledge of the way in which URLs are constructed will help you to guess the correct URL for a given web site. For example, most large American companies will have registered a domain name in the format www.company_name.com (eg. Microsoft - www.microsoft.com); American universities are almost always in the .edu domain (eg. Cornell - www.cornell.edu or UCLA - www.ucla.edu); and Canadian universities follow the format www.university_name.ca (eg. Simon Fraser University - www.sfu.ca or the University of Toronto - www.utoronto.ca). |
| Wildcards: Some search engines allow the use of "wildcard" characters in search statements. Wildcards are useful for retrieving variant spellings (eg. color, colour) and words with a common root (eg. psychology, psychological, psychologist, psychologists, etc.). Wildcard characters vary from one search engine to another, the most common ones being *, #, and ?. Some search engines permit only right truncation (eg. psycholog*), while others also support middle truncation (eg. colo*r). |
| Relevancy ranking: Most of the search engines covered in this workshop use an algorithm to rank retrieved documents in order of decreasing relevance. Consequently, it is often not necessary to browse through more than the first few pages of results, even when the total results number in the thousands. Furthermore, some search engines (eg. Alta Vista) allow the searcher to determine which terms are the most "important", while others (Excite, Infoseek) have a "more like this" feature that permits the searcher to generate new queries based on relevant documents retrieved by the initial search. |