Find it on the Web!
A Presentation to the Vernon PC Users Club

What are Search Engines?
Search engines are websites that allow you to perform a search of the Internet using specified keywords, dates, or other parameters, and return your search results in the form of webpages that match your search criteria. Search engines can be divided into 3 types: Directories, such as Yahoo, true search engines such as Alta Vista and Hotbot, and meta search (or multi-threaded) engines such as Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Also try these directories of search tools (where you can also find subject-specific search engines):

• Beaucoup! (www.beaucoup.com)
• Search Engine Colossus (www.searchenginecolossus.com)
• The BigHub.com (www.thebighub.com)

How do Search Engines Work?
Most search engines catalog webpages based on the keywords they find in the title of the webpage, the text displayed on the webpage and the META tags, which are hidden in the programming of the webpage. Some search engines such as Google assign greater relevance to pages according to the number of links to those pages from other webpages or websites. Some people like to think the measure of a website is how many links are made to it from other websites.

How Do Search Engines Catalog Websites?
The directory-style search engine works on the basis of submissions: you must submit or add your website to the directory. The directory usually has a staff that reviews the website and places it into the directory accordingly. But beware! This process can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, and there is also a chance that the website is not accepted for inclusion in the directory.

The true search engines operate robots or spiders, which are tiny programs that follow links or crawl through the Web and catalog all the websites they encounter along the way. Most search engines such as Alta Vista also take submissions so you can manually add your website to their index. These types of search engines have a larger index of websites, but there is also a good chance that many of these sites either do not exist any longer or have been moved.

Meta search engines use multiple search engines at the same time to perform your search. This is powersearching at its best! Some examples of meta search engines are Dogpile and my personal favourite, Metacrawler.

NARROW DOWN YOUR SEARCH
For example, searching for the words danish blue cheese will return webpages that have the word danish, or the word blue, or the word cheese (but not necessarily all of these words or in that order).

REQUIRING WORDS USING THE PLUS SYMBOL:
Now if you add a plus symbol (+) directly in front of each word, you are requiring all of those words to be in your search results. Typing in +danish +blue +cheese means that you should only get webpages that have all of the words "danish", "blue" and "cheese" (although not necessarily in that order or even close together).

EXCLUDING WORDS USING THE MINUS SYMBOL:
If you're searching for a chocolate chip cookie recipe but you are allergic to nuts, try these search terms:
+chocolate +chip +cookie +recipe -nuts

This type of searching is very useful and helps you exclude useless results. For example, when searching for Vernon, BC, you may encounter other Vernons in Washington and New York. You can exclude these results by adding -Washington -New -York to your search terms.

AS A PHRASE:
Now take your search one step further: Search for "danish blue cheese" as a phrase. All you have to do is enclose your search terms with quotes (i.e. type in "danish blue cheese"). Now the search engine performs a search for any webpages with the entire phrase "danish blue cheese", exactly as spelled and in that order.

CAPITAL LETTERS, PLURAL FORMS & ALTERNATE SPELLING:
Most search engines interpret lower case letters as either upper or lower case. Thus, if you want both upper and lower case occurrences returned, type your keywords in all lower case letters. However, if you want to limit your results to initial capital letters (e.g., "City of Vernon") or all upper case letters, type your keywords that way.

Like capitalization, most search engines interpret singular keywords as singular or plural. If you want plural forms only, make your keywords plural.

A few search engines support truncation or wildcard features that allow variations in spelling or word forms. The asterisk (*) symbol tells the search engine to return alternate spellings for a word at the point that the asterisk appears. For example, capital* returns web pages with capital, capitals, capitalize, and capitalization.

Additional Resources:

PowerSearching 101
www.thewebtools.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm

Sink or Swim: Internet Search Tools & Techniques - by Ross Tyner from OUC
www.ouc.bc.ca/libr/connect96/search.htm

Back to Top

© 1999 Ingenius Webdesign