Search Strategies
- Introduction
- Using Search Engines
- Key Words & Controlled Language
- Relevance Ranking
- Refining or Expanding your Search
Introduction
Searching for information on the Internet can be a daunting task. Developing skills for finding, using, managing and evaluating information is even more important in the electronic age than ever before. Fortunately, the technology which threatens to cause "information overload" also provides some useful tools for finding just the pieces of information we need.
For more information on conducting your research project, make sure you read Research on the Internet, part of our Using the Internet section, this page is designed to give you some tips about using Search Engines efficiently.
Finally it is important to remember that the Internet does not contain all the most useful information in the world. Libraries and more traditional sources for gathering information are often more effective for many research tasks. Use electronic information sources selectively, bearing in mind that it may be more effective in terms of your time and on-line costs.
Using search engines
You can do simple searches with these Search Engines directly from the Search page, but each Search Engine also offers advanced searching capabilities, which can help you to refine your searches.
In order to take advantage of these advanced search capabilities you will need to go to the particular Search Engines's Home Page. To do this, simply click on the name of the Search Engine on the Search the Whole Internet page.
Remember that by using the Search Engines you are searching the entire Internet, not just SOFWeb or its Resource Centre, so a search of the whole Internet using one of these Search Engines might well bring you up a list of hundreds of resources in your search result. As a quick tip, most of the Search Engines use relevance filters, which for your purposes means that the information you want is likely to be in the first two or three screens of "hits".
Because your search is likely to bring you back so many hits, you will need to be very careful about evaluating resources for relevance, appropriateness and accuracy.
Because you are searching the entire Internet, and not simply a small section of it (for example, SOFWeb or EdNA), you need to recognise that you might find some resources which you consider inappropriate.
Searching the Internet may lead to information considered by some to be inappropriate for schools. Students and teachers should be aware of the SOFWeb User Code of Conduct before searching the Internet. Taking Care on the Net provides important advice for those using the Internet in schools. If you plan to use material retrieved from the Internet you should also be aware of your rights and obligations in relation to copyright.
Keywords & controlled language
A keyword is a word (or phrase) which describes the topic you are searching for. You are probably already used to using keyword searches in library catalogues, and they work in a similiar fashion on the Internet.
You can combine keywords to refine your search. The thing you need to remember about keywords is that they depend on you, and the writer of the information you are looking for having a similiar understanding of the concept.
It is preferable to refine your search before you start a search on the Internet. Make a list of possible keywords which describe your topic. Keep in mind words that are related or spelt differently or are more general or specific. For example, keywords associated with sewerage could be waste water (related term), water pollution (related term), sewage (different spelling), waste management (general term), water management (general term ) or public health (general term). If you have keywords prepared before you go on-line then your searching will be more efficient.
You also need to bear in mind that if you are searching overseas sites, there may be cultural differences in the terms they use, for example, if you were looking for information about universities, you need to remember that the Americans use the term college. This difference might be an advantage if you want to make sure that most of the information you find is Australian in origin.
There are very few controlled language ways of searching the Internet, but if you are going to use an on-line database it might be useful to understand what controlled language means.
A controlled language list (also called a thesaurus) is a list of preferred terms for concepts and subjects. The books in your library catalogue are listed under particular subject headings. These subject headings are part of the controlled language list which the library cataloguer used when adding the item to the catalogue.
A controlled language list is essentially a list of categories and sub-categories for all the information which is to be included, so that in the case of your school library the list attempts to have terms for just about the range of things students and teachers are likely to want to know about.
Controlled language searches are much more precise and easy to refine than keyword searches, as long as you are using the correct terms, that is, those terms which are part of the thesaurus.
Most databases (such as your library catalogue) will allow you to do both keyword and controlled language (subject) searching, but the Internet search engines will only allow you to do keyword searching, which is why you need to understand our next section on relevance ranking.
Relevance ranking
While you don't need to understand how search engines work to make good use of them, it can help to make your searching more efficient. Relevance ranking simply means the order in which the search engine you have used, returns the hits for your keyword search.
Each search engine does this slightly differently, but all use relevance ranking in one way or another to order the results. We've all done searches that returned hundreds, if not thousands of hits, have you ever wondered how they are organised? This is relevance ranking. Search engines use various estimations to decide what relevance ranking a particular site will have in your search results, depending on such things as how many times your search term(s) appear in the document, how close to the beginning of the document they appear, or whether they appear in the invisible keyword headings (metadata tags) on the top of the page.
For searchers, all we need to remember is that relevance ranking can help us decide which of the sites returned in a search are worth looking at: and a good rule of thumb is that those sites with a relevance ranking in the 90s are probably worth looking at. This might mean the first two or three pages of results.
If you would like to know more about search engines, have a look at the Search Engine Watch website (www.searchenginewatch.com), which has lots of information about how search engines work.
If you don't find what you need in higher rankings, rather than spend time looking through all the hits, you would be better off rethinking and refining your search. which brings us to the next section of this page.
Refining or expanding your search
A general rule of thumb is that if you get too many hits returned you need to refine (narrow) your search. If you get two few hits you need to expand your search.
Generally the more hits you get, the fewer directly relevant hits there are, so in order to return fewer, more relevant hits, you need to change your search terms. You can do this by using less general terms , i.e. using "sewerage" which is a particular term, instead of "waste management" which is a more general term.
You could also add a search term. So instead of searching just for "cat" which on Alta Vista returns 700 000 hits, add a search term to narrow the scope of your search. If you searched for "cat + Australia", instead of 700 000 hits, you will get 22, which is quite a difference.
The + sign in Alta Vista indicated that the search terms should appear in the same document. If you had searched for "cat Australia", Alta Vista would have searched for all the documents with "cat" and all the documents with "Australia" and returned 800 000 hits! This is why you need to understand the special features of each search engine in order to make the best use of them.
If you need to expand your number of hits, you need to expand your search terms. You could use a more general term instead of a specific one, or you could remove a search term.
