| Remember that
searching in not a one size fits all situation; good searching is query
based. You should pick your tools based on the query or what you
need to know. Are you looking for a simple location, such as finding a
web site, an email address or is it a long-range comprehensive search?
Students need to plan and refine their search and do
much better if they know exactly what they are looking for.
Sometimes it helps to do some reading and exploring. Brainstorm
possible keywords and subject terms and th9ink of words they should not
use, that might throw them off track. One of the hardest things to
do which searchers is make them realize there are many different tools
out there and to try them all. Never rely on one search tool.
Background
Yahoo came first and we were all so excited with this
early, people-based effort to organize the Web in a subject directory
approach. Then came Alta vista, Excite, Lycos and HotBot - which
use spiders (robots) to crawl the Web to retrieve word-relevant matches.
Then came the search tool of millions: Google whose
PageRank technology brought us beyond mere word relevance, identifying
heavily linked-to sites and forcing these to the top its results
list. combined with its assumed AND, a useful Google Subject
Directory, and its capability to effectively search images, email lists
and alternate file formats (such as PDFs), it offers incredible scope
and relevant results. It is good, but not always the best starting
place nor is it the only choice.
Subject
Directories
Don't forget about subject directories. When
you're not sure of the subject or conducting a general search, always
begin in a subject directory. They will not be as comprehensive or
near the scope of the typical search engine, directories serve as
gateways to a topic and frequently feature expert guidance.
Here are some of the best:
Librarians’ Index to
the Internet
http://lii.org
INFOMINE
: http://infomine.ucr.edu/
Academic Info
http://www.academicinfo.net/
About.com
: http://about.com
KidsClick!
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/
Yahooligans!
: http://yahooligans.com
Multnomah County Library’s Homework Center
http://www.multcolib.org/homework/
BigChalk’s Homework Central
http://bigchalk.com
Subscription Services
Some of the best references on the Web are
not made use of. We spend hours on Yahoo and Google searching
while we could be searching high quality, full-text magazine, newspaper,
reference and media databases, frequently supported with state funds and
free to the public through school and public libraries. These
materials have commercial value, hence authors and publishers are not
giving it away for free. some of our best info still should be
obtained from traditional print sources or electronic sources obtained
by subscription only. AIRS, EBSCO, and the GaleNet databases offer
remote password access to home users and are available to students
password-free district wide. These are excellent places for
student researchers to begin their searches, the are of uniform high
quality and carefully structured and indexed.
Invisible
Web
Most of the invisible web is made up of the contents
of thousands of specialized searchable databases that you can search via
the Web. The search results from many of these databases are delivered
to you in web pages that are just for your search. Such pages very often
are not stored anywhere: it is easier and cheaper to dynamically
generate the answer page for each query than to store all the possible
pages containing all the possible answers to all the possible queries
people could make to the database. Search engines cannot find or create
these pages. Examples include the historic documents contained in the
Library of Congress' American Memory Collection and the wealth of images
available at the National Gallery of Art. You can search these
databases once you are actually in them, but their files are not
accessible through a traditional search. How do you find these
materials? A number of search tools specialize in identifying
databases and subject-specific resources. Among them are:
Invisible-web.net:
http://www.invisible-web.net/
Invisible Web.com
:http://www.invisibleweb.com/
Complete Planet
:http://www.completeplanet.com
Genius Find
: http://www.geniusfind.com/
Librarian’s Index to the Internet
: http://lii.org
Incy Wincy: http://www.incywincy.com/
Pinakes
http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html
*searching
tip:
another way to find these subject-specific gateways is to include the
word database with you subject terms in a general purpose search engine.
|
|
If
you and your students rely on one traditional search engine exclusively,
you may be missing an important search refinement strategy. Auto-categorization,
or topic clustering, presents those frustrating millions of search
results in an organized manner. Laura Cohen, who offers her Web lessons
to the world through her pages at the University of Albany, describes
this feature as "horizontal searching." Consider
traditional search tools, which create long lists of results for
browsing, one page after the next, as "vertical" search tools.
"Horizontal" tools analyze a search, and automatically sort
results into categories and, in some cases, subcategories. The feature
allows students to instantly select results for Saturn, the planet, from
a result list that might contain thousands of results relating to
Saturn, the car. Similarly, it identifies and groups clusters of links
relating to Saturn's rings, its satellites, and related astronomical
events. When this feature works well, it helps students to refine their
information need, by distinguishing subtopics and the nuances of a
subject's vocabulary, and by allowing them to quickly identify and
remove the irrelevant. The net
effect of a horizontal search is that relevant information that might
have been virtually invisible, buried on page 300 of a vertical result
list, can rise to the top, accessible through categories listed on page
one. Cohen recommends learning about
and using one or two of these new horizontal tools as companions to a
vertical search. You might decide to begin your research at Vivísimo to
see the span of topics and subtopics available, and then return to an
old favorite such as Google once you know what you are looking for.
Which search engines search horizontally? Vivísimo,
at http://www.vivisimo.com/,
spontaneously organizes results from a variety of search tools into
hierarchies of topics and subtopics in a file-folder-tree display.
Turbo10, at http://www.turbo10.com,
is a meta-search engine with the impressive ability to search the deep
Web, that is, the Web not easily accessible by search engines because it
is buried in databases and non-HTML files. A pull-down menu lists its
clusters and the number of sites each cluster offers. Guidebeam,
at http://www.guidebeam.com, is a
utility that has developed a kind of symbiotic relationship with a
variety of search tools. Now posted over Yahoo, Guidebeam extracts and
infers phrases from documents, and automatically clusters them into a
browsable "hyperindex." WiseNut,
at http://www.wisenut.com, besides
its WiseGuide categories, claims to improve on Google's link relevance
system with more frequent Web crawling and context-sensitive ranking.
Teoma, at http://www.teoma.com,
now owned by Ask Jeeves, organizes results in three sections: Results
are ranked by subject-specific popularity; Refine suggests topic
clusters to narrow the search; and Resources offers link collections
created by experts and enthusiasts. iBoogie,
at http://www.iboogie.com,
resembles Vivísimo in its folder-tree approach, but its deep Web
holdings tend to be commercial. Query
Server, at www.queryserver.com
, a meta-search tool, queries the general Web, or health, money or
government sites, and offers handy customizing features along with its
Result Clusters. Ixquick, at http://www.ixquick.com,
a meta-search tool with a kind of "greatest hits" approach to
results, offers "Related Searches" suggestions, and a star
ranking system summarizing the consensus of the major search engines.
Teach
an Old Engine New Tricks
AltaVista
: http://www.altavista.com
recently introduced its Prisma
search refinement feature. Parallel terms, appearing
at the top of each results page, now points searchers to related topics
of interest. Clicking on a term automatically adds it to the original
query. Other good news, AltaVista:
as with Google,
all queries now assume the AND operator.
Old timer, Excite: http://search.excite.com/
recently became a meta-search tool and has added topic
clusters to the tops of its results page.
AlltheWeb
: http://alltheweb.com new
clusters (or FAST topics) rely on the respected Open Directory Project
as a backbone. The results page also includes effective
"narrow your search" suggestions. AlltheWeb
now has the advantage of a scope that rivals (and claims to beat) Google.
It also added (recently) the ability to search PDF files. Its
impressive refresh cycle (crawling the Web every 7 to 10 days) places it
among the most current of all search engines.
New features to
watch:
Kartoo, at http://www.kartoo.com,
a meta-search tool, available in either Flash or HTML versions, presents
its "topical families" of results on a highly attractive
"cartographic interface."
WebBrain, at www.webbrain.com ,
uses concept mapping to make the subject categories of the Open
Directory project more visual and accessible.
Alexa, at www.alexa.com, combines
Google's approach to results with Amazon's marketing techniques. When
you visit a site from Alexa's result lists, you see a thumbnail preview,
rankings, reviews, topic clusters, and a note about its unique clusters:
"people who visit this page also visit... "
|
