-
Find Scholarly Sites
- Librarians' Index
- SCIRUS (Science sites)
- Scout Archives
- WWW Virtual Library
- Singing Fish
- Ask
- Dogpile
- Teoma
- Vivisimo
- Yahoo!
- Citing the Web
- Evaluating Sites
- Search Engines
- Search Tips
- URLs
Web Searching Tips
Your Strategy | Using Results
These tips are designed to be useful in a variety of search engines.
To become an effective web searcher, experiment and visit the Help or Tips area.
Read the screens to learn the different rules for searching and advanced functions.
Your Search Strategy
Subject Searches
Subject directories like the one at dmoz are good for finding general information. dmoz's directory provides subject areas that you can select to use as a guide to web sites related to a topic.
Keyword Searches
Keyword searching uses indexes that search all of the contents of a site, not just the title or subject. These indexes search for the precise search terms that you enter.
Extra precise searching can be used for exact titles or phrases, known authors, items or companies. For exact phrase searching, surround your search terms with quotation marks. This will often find documents with the words in precise order.
Complex Searches
If a subject or keyword search is not retrieving the information you seek, you may need to do a more complex search. This may include boolean logic, wildcard characters, multiple searches, or rare words and concepts.
Boolean logic
works in most search engines. Use the following terms within your keywords:
- AND (limits your search: both words must appear in the record)
Example: women and coal mining
- OR (expands your search: at least one word appears in the record)
Example: women or female or gender or woman
- NOT (limits your search: the term following NOT must not appear in the record)
Example: women coal miners not England
- Parentheses (groups portions of Boolean queries together)
Example: women and (coal mining or gold mining)
- Plus (+) and minus (-) signs (sometimes used in place of AND (+) or NOT (-))
Example: (women + coal mining) - England
Wildcard Caracters
are used by many search engines to stand for various spellings or endings. Common wildcard characters are *, ?, and #. Some search engines allow you to use wildcards in the middle of a term, covering more than one spelling (wom*n for women and woman). Others allow wildcard use only at the end of a term.
Example: When searching for Appalachian stereotypes
- Use appalachi! or appalachi* to search for Appalachi, Appalachian, or Appalachians.
- Use stereotyp! or stereotyp* to search for stereotype, stereotypes, or stereotypical.
In some cases, you may combine terms like: appalachi! AND stereotyp!
Multiple Searches
Try multiple searches using variations of words and synonyms for your topics. Most search engines automatically look for plural versions of terms.
Example: to find information about women's sports try:
sports, games, play, girls, gender, women, etc.
Rare words and concepts
If you have one rare word in your subject, try searching that word alone in metasearch engines.
What to do with the Results
Relevancy ranking
Evaluate your results quickly. You should recognize useful information within the first 15 retrieved sites. If the results are not what you are searching for, change your query.
Find Similar or More Like This
If you identify a "hit" on your results list that matches what you are searching for, follow the find similar or more like this link to go to other pages that share attributes with that document.
Find button
You may follow a link in your results list and not immediately recognize why the document was retrieved because the search terms do not appear at the top of the document. Use the Find button in your browser to search for your terms within the document (often activated by hitting Ctrl + f). You should soon be able to decide if the document is relevant or not.
Bookmark
Use the bookmark function in your browser to save the results list if you may want to go back to the search later.
Save time
by multitasking. Use metasearch engines and open multiple browser windows from your results list. Right click to open a new browser window for each hit. The selected page will load in the new window while you view one that is already open and decide if it is relevant.