Searching Internet

Effectively For Research

By
Muhammad Farooq Adeel,
Additional Director, CSA

Overview
This session aims to enable you to:
Explore the strengths and weaknesses of different

search tools: how to pick the right one(s) for the

job.
Learn to use the tools appropriately
Evaluate the information that search tools provide:

how to efficiently cream off the most relevant

results.
Develop a strategy for building up your own well-

structured bank of links for future

Just because you live on

the Web, doesnt mean
you cant learn how to
use it more effectively
and more powerfully!

Sure, for some of you this is

a review. But many of you
may not remember some of
the strategies that put you in
control of your searches

We already know
how to use the
Web! then why
this session?

Surfing vs Searching
Surfing is used to describe casual looking
through material generally with nothing specific
in mind.
Searching describes looking for something
specific, and generally by entering search
terms at a search engine to find information
you want.
Surfing is scanning the worldwide web through
links from one site to another or one page to
another.
Searching on the other hand refers to looking
for specific pieces of information using search
engines and other tools.

Search, dont surf!

Its a multi trillion page Web!

Search Tools
Search Engines
Meta-search Engines
Subject Directories
Information Gateways
Specialist Databases

Search Engine:
A software programme for the retrieval of
data, files or documents from a database
or network
A

brief summary of the indexed web page is prepared

The index usually contains URLs, titles, headings, and
other words from the HTML document

Good For: Precision searches, using named

people or organisations, searching quickly and
widely, topics which are hard to classify
Not Good For: Browsing through a subject area

Main Parts of Search Engine

What you see:

Search Entry Form

Search, Submit or Go Button
Display of Sites w/Hypertext Link
Online Help or Options

What you dont see:

Bot or Spider that searches the Internet

Database(index) of information gathered by
Spider

How Google Search Works

How GOOGLE Search Works.mp4

Meta-search Engines
Skim-search several search engines at once
Usually reach about 10% of results of each engine

they visit
Cannot perform advanced-style searches which use

engine-specific syntax
Good For: quick search, results overview, doing
simple searches with 1 or 2 keywords
Not Good For: comprehensive results from a
complex search

Meta Search Tools...

Search using multiple search

engines

Search using a meta search

tool

Major Meta-search Engines

Zuula.com
Brainboost

Ixquick
Kayak

DeeperWeb
Dogpile

LeapFish
Mamma

Excite
HotBot

Metacrawler
MetaLib

Info.com

Directories
Human beings:

View sites
Classify sites
Sometimes review and/or rate sites

Ideal for browsing broad topics

Less comprehensive than search engines
Less duplication
Higher quality

Two Essential Directories

Librarians Index to the Internet

http://lii.org
Well-organized, selective, and continually
updated collection, also known as the thinking
persons Yahoo. Maintained by a team of librarians at
Berkeley Public Library
Kids Click

http://kidsclick.org/
Great starting point for kids. Annotations are
carefully written. Offers grade levels and
describes how
illustrated a site is.

Information Gateways
This type of resources include Internet catalogues, subject
directories and virtual libraries
Specialising in resources on a particular field
Organised into hierarchical subject categories
Compiled by people, not robots
More focus on sifting for relevance and quality
Good For: topics that fall into a thematic area that has a
subject directory, guided browsing in your subject area
Not Good For: Quickly finding information from widely
varying themes

Web Portals
Is website that brings information from

diverse sources in a unified way

Types: Personal, News, Govt, cultural,
corporate, stock, tender portals etc.

Invisible/Deep/Hidden Web
The Webs largest growing resource
Estimated to be 40 times size of the
visible Web
Most not subject to fees
Includes topic-specific databases

Why is some of the Web invisible?

It is a proprietary database
The crawler does not search a particular
file format or non-text interface
The page is available only after
registration
The page is available to some engines
but not others. No two engines are the
same

HEC Subscribed Databases

Taylor & Francis Journals
World Bank eLibrary
Institute for Operations Research and Management
Sciences (INFORMS)
Springer
Duke University Press
To Public sector Universities only
Jstor.org
Oxford University Press - Oxford Journals
EBSCO etc.

Boolean Operators in Searching

the Net
Uses commands (operators) such as AND,OR,

NOT
Different search tools may use different
symbols AND NOT +

How important AND is!!!

Query: I'm interested in the

relationship between education and literacy

When do you really need OR?

OR is generally used for synonyms or related words.

Query: I would like information
about education or literacy

Use NOT as a refinement technique when

problem words are likely to come up

Query: I want to see information about education, but I want

to avoid seeing anything about secondary

Phrase and proximity searching

Using quotation marks allows you to
search for an exact phrase, e.g.
"information literacy
Using NEAR allows you to specify how
close to each other the terms you are
searching for should be

Truncation or wildcard searches

Truncation: place a symbol at the end of the word so you
search for variant endings of that word e.g. litera$ would
look for literature, literacy, literal
Wildcards: place a symbol within a word to find
variations on it e.g. analy*e would find analyse or
analyze
Different symbols - including $ * # ! : - are used by
different search tools

Web Search Strategies...

Tips for effective web searching

Use as many synonyms as possible - search

engines use statistical retrieval methods and
produce better results with more query words

Avoid use of very common words (e.g., computer)

Enter search terms in lower case. Use upper case

to force exact match (e.g. Light Combat Aircraft,
LCA)

Web Search Strategies...

Repeat the search by varying search terms and their

combinations; try this on different search tools

Enter most important terms first - some search tools

are sensitive to word order

Go through at least 5 pages of search results before

giving up the scan

Google Advanced Search

Operators
Intitle/Allintitle:
Allintext:
Inurl/Allinurl:
Site:
Related:
Link:
Define:
Filetype:

Now its your turn!

Good Luck!!