WebJunction

Tips for Refining Your Search

Have you or your staff ever searched for Web sites in a search engine and received a grand total of 20 million returns for your viewing pleasure? Have patrons reported similar scenarios, with varying degrees of frustration? Since search engines gather Web pages electronically, they typically have a much larger number of sites than a typical directory. How can you narrow down your search? There are several useful methods for narrowing down your searches that work with most search engines.

As you work through the following strategies, try the suggestions with a topic of your own, and think about how patrons might be able to use these strategies.

Choose specific keywords

Beware of searching with common terms -- you will likely receive an overwhelming number of hits. For example, a search for "disease" in the search engine, Google, will return 9,260,000 hits, but a narrower search for the specific term "lupus" returns 550,000 hits.

Some search engines simply ignore a pre-selected list of very common terms, called stop words, which occur so frequently they are not useful for finding relevant pages. Because these words are so common, the search engine won't bother to “stop” to look for them in a Web page. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry on stop words.

Add more terms

Google searches for Web pages containing all the words you enter, so you can search for a string of words in order to narrow down your search. For example, a search for "lupus support group" narrows your search to about 54,200 hits, and even better, "lupus support group Texas" results in 5,320 search results. This is still too many to look through every hit, but it is likely you will find relevant information within the first 20 hits.

Most major search engines look for Web pages that include all the terms you enter, using AND as the automatic connector between search terms. However, the search engine Excite reverts to looking for any of the terms. To find out how a specific search engine will searches, look at its Help page. Also, InfoPeople's Search Tools Chart, http://www.infopeople.org/search/chart.html, and Best Search Tools, http://infopeople.org/search/tools.html, have convenient summaries of many search engine features.

Search for a phrase

Search engines typically look for Web pages that contain the terms you enter in the search box, but these terms can be located in any order, anywhere in the page. If you want to be sure each term is present and in a specific order, you must search for the terms as a phrase. To do this, place quotation marks around the terms to ensure they will be searched for exactly as they appear in the search box.

The real world: Place quotation marks around the phrase "when my blue moon turns to gold again" when searching for Web pages about the 1950s hit song.

Some basic math

Searches can be refined using + (AND) and - (NOT) to require or exclude words from the pages that are returned with a search. Use + when the term must appear in the search result. If you do not want a search engine to find pages that have a specific word in them, use the - symbol.

The real world: A patron is interested in researching lung cancer associated with bronchitis and other illnesses, but she is not interested in lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking. To retrieve relevant results, that patron could enter the search string "lung cancer -smoking," or "lung cancer bronchitis -smoking."

For additional pointers and hints, see Search Engine Math http://searchenginewatch.com/2156021.

Filters

What does a kitchen sink strainer do? It allows a small amount of material through and blocks out a lot of other things. Many search engines have built-in filters to provide another option for refining your search. For example, you can:

• Search for sites within a specified time period.

• Search for sites in a specific language.

• Specify a term in the Web site's title.

• Search with a term in the Web address, such as a specific domain or country code.

Boolean operators

Another option for narrowing a search is using Boolean operators, which might be familiar to you or your staff from other databases you've searched. Boolean searching consists of using the operators AND, OR, and NOT with your search terms to control which words appear in the Web pages the search engine returns. We have already looked at using basic math signs, such as + and -, to refine a search. Boolean searching can be thought of as more-sophisticated math.

Fortunately for patrons who aren't familiar with the concept of Boolean searching, many search engines build Boolean operators into their advanced search screens. Google, Fast Search, and Hotbot offer built-in Boolean searching on their advanced search pages. Click the Advanced Search button on the main search page to access advanced searching.

For more information on Boolean searching, see the explanation page by the University of Albany, http://library.albany.edu/subject/tutorials/education/boolean.html.