Conducting a Web search: Tips and tricks
Below are some tips gathered from all over the Web that will help you improve your searching on the Web. Enjoy!
- About.com search tips: A nice little set of tips, applicable to any search engine: http://websearch.about.com/od/internetresearch/a/genericsearch.htm.
- Web site search comparison: The people at infopeople.org have kindly assembled a comparison of common search engines and the most effective ways to use them: http://www.infopeople.org/search/chart.html.
- The best site for your needs: NoodleTools has provided a nice little page that does more than just explain Boolean searches. It also doesn't just give a generic ranking of different Web search sites (e.g., Google, Altavista). Instead, NoodleTools focuses on helping you choose the best search engine for your particular task. Check it out: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html.
- Google beginning search tips: Starts with the basics, but is pretty good: http://www.google.com/help/basics.html. The tips on this page apply pretty much universally to any search engine (e.g., Altavista, Ask), not just Google.
- Google advanced search tips: For an advanced tutorial, check out the following URL: http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html. Again, most of these tips apply to sites other than Google.
- Altavista search tips: Altavista's basic search tips are in the following URL: http://www.altavista.com/help/search/default.The advanced ones are here: http://www.altavista.com/help/search/help_adv. And yes, you can apply these tips to various search engines.
Additional Web search engines
- Clusty: A metasearch engine such as Metacrawler that also uses cluster-based searching. Cluster-based searches return groups of results in groups of folders. Such search results offer context-rich results that are thought to provide a wider range of information than standard search engines. Run by Carnegie Mellon University, who created a similar, once-popular search engine called Lycos.
- Infomine: A search engine organized by major topics (e.g., Medial sciences, Business and economics, ejournals, maps, Humanities). Run by the University of California at Riverside.
- del.icio.us: Not really a search engine site, but you can search through other people's bookmarks - you'll be surprised to see how useful this type of searching is on a topic.