Pandia Search Engine Tutorial

Directories:

• hierarchical databases with references to websites
• websites that are included are hand picked by living human beings and classified according to the rules of that particular search service
• very useful when you have no more than a general notion of what you are looking for
• ex: Yahoo! Directory

Engines:

• "engines" or "robots" that crawl the Web looking for new webpages
• ead the webpages and put the text (or parts of the text) into a large database or index that you may access
• should be your first choice when you know exactly what you are looking for
• cover larger part of the Web than directories
• ex: Google, Yahoo! Search

Metasearch:

• search several search engines and directories at the same time, trying to extract the most relevant hits from all of them
• search syntax is problematic
• ex: Search.com, GO2NET's Metacrawler

Boolean Searching:

• the operator AND means that the word that follows has to be in the text of the pages that are to be listed
• pages including the words following AND NOT will not be listed
• the operatre OR brings up pages with containing the individual words as well as pages with both
• engines interpret the space between the words as AND
• some engines may interpret the space between the words as OR
• Quotes keep phrases together instead of the search engine finding pages for each of the individual words
• use the NEAR search operator to bring up pages where the desired words are near each other
• some seach engines are case sensitive
• the use of parentheses can clear things up
• different search engines' use of operators may vary

Simplified Search Syntax ("Search Engine Math")

• put a plus sign in front of words that must be present on the webpage
• a minus sign in front of a word will tell the search engine to subtract pages that contain that particular word
• if there is no sign in front of a word, most search engines will nevertheless read a + sign
• use the minus sign (or the AND NOT term for that matter) with great care; you may lose sites with information you need on it
• note that there must not be any space between the relevant sign and the word

Field Searching

• Title: The text you can read in the bar at the top of the browser window, normally contains important keywords referring to the content of the page. restricting your search to the page titles will you get fewer -- but more focused -- hits
• URL: The address (the Uniform Resource Locator) of a page, you may restrict your search to pages with addresses that contain a certain word
• Domains: The unique name that identifies an Internet site, have two or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general.

Error Codes

• the message "Document not found" confirms that the site exists, and the webpage may still be there
• you have been given an incorrect or out dated address, there may be a file with information about faq.html higher up in the file hierarchy
• delete the last part of the address until you come to the next "/
• if your browser is unable to locate the server (the computer containing the webpage) this could mean that the server does not exist any more
• if everything fails, you could visit Google where you may find an old version of the file you are looking for

Menu-Based Searching

• will include one (or more) search forms where you enter your search query
• simplest versions will give you one form to enter all your keywords, and a pull down menu that gives various options regarding how these keywords are to be treated by the search engine: All these words, Any words or one of these words, or The exact phrase
• separate filters or sieves, one put beneath the other, and each of them filtering out and discarding a certain number of web pages
• each “filter” you apply will narrow down your search and return fewer results
• too many filters and you end up sorting out useful and relevant pages, too few and you end up with too many hits

Pandia's 17 Tips for Net Searching