Never-ending Search:

(What you REALLY need to know about online searching)

Ms. Emili 2009-2010 school year

Why do we need to know this??

Just because you live on

the Web,doesn’t mean

you can’t learn how to

use it more effectively!

FSRE (for sure?)

Focus: mission or questionStrategize: search tools? Key words?Refine: improve! Narrow, broaden, etc.Evaluate: quality of information ok?

Good searchers…

Mine their results Consult several search tools Use advanced search Use search strategies Modify their results

Pre-process your search terms

Must: Might Must NOT

What the heck does “Boolean” mean?

So, basically…

AND: requires ALL words to appear = less results, more specific

OR: captures ANY of your search words = more results, less specific

When do I use which??

AND: use this to limit your search; narrow your topic; find more specific information

OR: use this as a broad, beginning search; capture synonyms; find more results if you’re not getting enough hits

Using exact phrases

Don’t overuse this strategy! Not every group of words is a phrase (use and/or instead)

Phrases, names, titles Ex. “vitamin A” “George Washington” “The Lion,

the Witch, and the Wardrobe”

Why use “advanced search”?

Limits your results Able to search by field

Title, domain, etc.

http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Tips for advanced searchers

Search within Use “find” to search within a page of full text

Field searching Title, subject tags, etc.

Word stemming: Wom*n

A field guide to search tools

Search engines: databases of billions of Web pages, gathered automatically. Broad, often overwhelming results.

Subject directories: links to resources arranged by subject. Browse through. Selected, evaluated, maintained by humans (often experts!)

Subscription databases: provided by libraries. Reference materials, journal and newspaper articles, etc.

Subject directories: when to use them

When you’re just starting out (“Civil War”)

When you want to get to the best sites on a topic quickly

When you’re looking for annotations

When you want to avoid all the noise of search engines

Two Essential Directories

Librarian’s Index to the Internet http://lii.org

Internet Public Library (IPL) http://www.ipl.org/

Well-organized, selective, continually updated collection. Maintained by librarians.

Search Engines: when to use them

When you have a narrow topic or several keywords

When you’re looking for a specific siteWhen you want a large number of

documentsWhen you want to use advanced search

features

Search engines have limitations!

Not every page of a site is searchable

Paid placement/sponsored results distract from real results

Lots of “noise”- too many irrelevant results