Review Thursday: Search Engines

Search engines have been in the news a lot recently, due to the search engine merger between Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing, so there may be changes coming, but for now let’s look at some Google features that you may want to add to your search strategy.

An underused and very useful feature is the minus sign. It is a helpful addition to enhance your search. Take a look at the effect. If you type ‘dolphins’ in the search box, you will have many hits. Now add ‘-football’ and you will see the total hits reduce in number. The minus sign needs to be immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. So your search is ‘dolphins –football.’ It is useful to look at the first group of results and then consider another term to exclude. You can use the minus sign multiple times, but remember that each term you exclude will no longer be searched. This can be a useful feature for narrowing your search as you view results and see recurring terms that you know are not what you’re seeking.

Another useful filter is narrowing the domain. Rather than searching the entire content of the internet, you may want to consider searching only a government or educational site. In some cases this gives you authoritative sites, although with the edu domain, you must be alert to the source. A PhD student’s site about dolphins might be excellent, while a 6th grader’s school presentation, well-done though it might be, would not carry authority as a source for you to use with your patrons. For the domain, you can type the word site followed immediately by a colon (site:) and then add the domain. Another useful domain is org, although always remember that it eliminates other domains, such as com or info. You can also narrow by country domains if you’d like to focus your search. If you’re interested, domains are listed at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

In the case of these limiters, as well as some others that will be discussed later, you can use the Google Advanced Search link, immediately to the right of ‘Search’ on the Google search page. Instead of typing ‘site’ or the minus sign, you can fill in the blank.