UNIT-1

Search Engines and Search Tools;

01/24/25 INTERNET SEARCHING TECHNIQUES BY A A. IDRIS 1

What is an Internet:
The Internet is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol
suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide.
It is a network of networks that consists of millions of
private, public, academic, business, and government
networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of
electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

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What is Internet Cont.….
The Internet carries an extensive range of information
resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext
documents and application of the World Wide Web (WWW),
the infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks
for file sharing and telephony.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application
protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information
systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the
World Wide Web.

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How do I connect to internet?
 A browser is software application that is used to access the
internet. A browser is used to locate, retrieve and display
content on the World Wide Web, including Web pages, images,
video and other files.
 The most common browser software titles on the market are:
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google's Chrome, Mozilla Firefox,
Apple's Safari, and Opera. Browser availability depends on the
operating system your computer is using (for example:
Microsoft Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, Mac OS, among others).

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 Internet Search Tool Types
 Search Engines: A search engine consists of the interface you use to
type in a query, an index of Web sites that the query is matched with,
and a software program (Called a Spider or bot) that goes out on the
web and gets new sites for the index. Search engines came into
existence in 1994. According to yahoo search directory 2003, there are
over 448 major search engines.
 Directories: Directories are categorized lists of sites picked out by
human editors. Directory databases are therefore much smaller than
those of search engines. However, the fact that the sites are hand
picked often means that you will find very high quality sites or
articles in the results. eg. Yahoo, Look Smart, and Snap.

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 Search Tool Types…..

Global Search Engine: Global search engines include:

Google, Fast search, Northern Light, Hot Bot, Alta Vista,
and others, reads pages from all over the world in many
languages. These engines may index more than a billion
pages.
 Regional Search Engines: Some search engines are
limited geographically. It refer to country specific search
engine for locating varied resources region wise . Example
: Euro Ferret( Europe) and Excite UK etc.

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Search Tool Types…..

Reference Search Engines: These provide
information from a set of reference works, such as an
encyclopedia. eg. Britannica, Americana, Bartleby
and Xrefer, Wikipedia etc.
Targeted Search Engines: These search engines
limit themselves to one subject, like biography,
Medicine, graphics, arts, fishing, and so forth. eg.
Medline.com

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Meta-Search Engines
 A Metasearch engine is a search tool that uses other search
engines’ data to produce their own results from the Internet. A meta
search engine submits your query to several other search engines
and returns a summary of the results. Therefore, the search results
you receive are an aggregate result of multiple searches.
 "Smarter" meta-searcher technology includes clustering and
linguistic analysis that attempts to show you themes within results,
and some fancy textual analysis and display that can help you dig
deeply into a set of results.

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 Types of meta Search engine

There are two types of meta Search engine:

 One type of SE provide separate list of results from each engine
that was searched. With this type of Meta SE , one can retrieve
comprehensive , and sometimes over whelming , results.
The other type is more common and returns a single list of results,
often with the duplicate hits removed . This type of Meta SE always
brings the results back to its own site for viewing

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Example of Meta-Search
Engines
 Meta search: Meta-search.com
 Dogpile: http://www.dogpile.com
 Excite: http://www.excite.com
 Meta Crawler : http://www.metacrawler.com
 Web crawler: http://www.webcrawler.com
 Mamma: http://www.mamma.com
 Search.com : http://www.search.com
SurrfWax www.surwax.com
Zapmeta www.zapmeta.com

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Categories of Information on
the Web
 The Free, Visible Web: This category include all the publicly
mounted web pages. These pages are indexed search engines.
To find information from this category, use a good search
engine or directory.
 The Free, Invisible Web: This category includes the contents of
sites that provide their articles or information free to users, but
that content may be accessible only by going directly to the site.
In other words, search engines cannot index it. Many databases
such as legal, medical, and financial etc. are part of this. To find
information from this category, you must go to appropriate
database.

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Cont.….
 Paid Databases over the Web: This category includes
commercial databases that libraries subscribe to, containing
scholarly journals, newspapers, court cases and the like.
Providers like Lexix-Nexis, UMI ProQuest, Infotrac, JSTOR,
EBSCO and many others in this group. To find information
from this category, you must have access to the database
(through password or an on-campus computer) and search
on the database directly.

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What is a search strategy?
 A search strategy is the ‘action plan’ for retrieving information. A
proper search strategy will save time and allow relevant information
from various resources to be retrieved from its sources.
 Types of search Strategy: There are basically four types of search
strategy:
a. Author Search
b. Title Search
c. Subject Search
d. Keyword Search

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Search Strategy Cont….
 Author Search: It allows you to search under the name of the author
whether single author or corporate Authors.
 Title Search: Title search is mainly used when you know the title of
the book or Journal.
 Subject Search: Subject search is constructed when you do not have
information on the author or title but you only know the subject.
 Keyword Search: Keyword search is the most efficient search
strategy when you are not searching for specific items. This strategy is
particularly useful for searching electronic databases and the internet.

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Steps in Formulating Keyword
Search
 Understand the Assignment Topic:
a. Understand your assignment topic and the focus of the topic.
b. Identify the difficult words and phrases used. Use dictionaries
and encyclopedias to explain and understand the topic.
c. Summaries the topic into a short statement of problem with a
focus on the main concepts only.

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Cont.…
 Analyze to Identify the Main Ideas that Make up the Topic
a. Break up the question into key concepts.
b. The main topic can be further divided into several sub-topics. eg.
The competitiveness of online marketing
c. Identify keywords for each concepts/sub-topic:
i. Develop a list of search terms and words related to each sub-topic.
ii. Use encyclopedias or thesaurus to get the related terms and synonyms to use
in the search.

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Cont.….
◦ iii. Use broader or narrower terms or scientific
terms to achieve much better result.
◦ iv. Select and combine the key words with Boolean
Connectors

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What are Boolean Connectors?
A connector helps to narrow down or broaden your search and give
a more accurate search by combining keywords, phrases, or terms.
The most common Boolean connector are AND, OR and NOT.
 Boolean Connector AND: it is used to combined more than one
keyword. For example if you want information on marketing and the
internet, you will use ‘AND’. Using the Boolean ‘AND’ will eliminate
all the general information on marketing and narrow down your
search to only information on internet marketing.

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Boolean Connector cont.…..
 Boolean Connector OR: The Boolean connector OR allows for search within
the same concept with different words. When your search result is too little or
you want find additional articles or books, use the Boolean connector OR to
connect the synonyms of the keywords. This will broaden your search and
increase the amount of information you find. Use brackets when using
connector OR in the search statement eg. You want search e-business and also
e-commerce, use OR to increase your search.
 Boolean Connector NOT: It also narrows the search, it is used to exclude
certain aspects from the search result that is when a particular keyword is not
required. Use brackets to group words under the same concepts. The connector
NOT finds records with the first keyword and eliminates records containing the
second keyword.

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Search Statement cont.….
 Marketing AND (e-business OR e-commerce)

 Internet AND ( marketing NOT retailing)

Use of Mathematical Operator
 some databases allow the use of Boolean Connectors or mathematical
operator symbol (+) and the minus symbol (-). eg.
Marketing + Internet Similar to AND in Boolean
Marketing – Retailing As in the function NOT in Boolean

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Proximity Searching
Proximity Searching: It is a way to search for two or more
words that occur within a certain number of words from
each other. The proximity operators are composed of a
letter (N or W) and a number (to specify the number of
words). The number cannot exceed 255.
 The proximity Operators: The W represent the word “
with(in)” and the N represent the word “near”. This type of
search is not available in all databases.

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Proximity Search Cont.…..
 Near Operator (N) - N5 finds the words if they are within five words
of one another regardless of the order in which they appear. For
example, type tax N5 reform to find results that would match tax
reform as well as reform of income tax.
Within Operator (W) - In the following example, W8 finds the
words if they are within eight words of one another and in the order
in which you entered them. For example, type tax W8 reform to find
results that would match tax reform but would not match reform of
income tax.

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Proximity Search Cont.…..
 In
addition, multiple terms can be used on either side of the
operator. See the following examples:
(baseball or football or basketball) N5 (teams or players)
oil W3 (disaster OR clean-up OR contamination).
Note : These operators will not work when parentheses are used to
separate search terms. eg.(Tax or tariff) N5 reform will not find
results. You must use (tax N5 reform) or (tariff N5 reform).

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Phrase Search
o Phrase Search: It involve enclosing a phrase in quotation
marks to ensure that the database searches for those words as
group. The database then searches for those words together in
the specific order you provided. eg. In order to successfully
search for a term like "library school" it's important that the
search engine allow syntax for phrase searching. Otherwise,
instead of getting documents about library schools you could be
getting documents about school libraries or documents where
the word "library" and "school" both appear but have nothing
to do with a library school.

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Truncation & Wildcard
Operators
 Truncation Operator: It is represented by an asterisk (*). Use the
truncation symbols to create searches where you want to retrieve all
variants of a word stem. For example, a search for educat* will
retrieve: educate, educating, education, educational, educator,
educators, etc.
 Wildcards Operator: A wildcard symbol is used within a word to
provide for all possible spellings or variations inside a word or word
stem. The most commonly used wildcard symbols for internal
truncation are the number symbol (#) and the question mark (?).
For example, a search for wom?n will retrieve: woman and women.

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Internet Search Queries
 A navigational query is a search query entered with the intent of
finding a particular website or webpage. For example, a user might enter
"youtube" into Google's search bar to find the YouTube site rather than
entering the URL into a browser's navigation bar or using a bookmark.
 Informational Search Query: Wikipedia defines informational search
queries as “Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., Internet searching) for
which there may be thousands of relevant results.” When someone
enters an informational search query into Google or another search
engine, they’re looking for information – hence the name. They are
probably not looking for a specific site, as in a navigational query, and
they are not looking to make a commercial transaction. They just want to
answer a question or learn how to do something.

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Internet Search Cont.……
 Transactional Search Query: It is a query that indicates an intent to
complete a transaction, such as making a purchase. Transactional
search queries may include exact brand and product names (like
“samsung galaxy s3”) or be generic (like “iced coffee maker”) or
actually include terms like “buy,” “purchase,” or “order.”
 Vertical searches are a subset of transactional search queries, and
they represent people looking to make a transaction in a specific
industry. These include local searches, restaurant searches, hotel
searches, flight searches, etc.

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