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.

Review Thursday: Search Engine Features

Many librarians, not to mention our patrons, automatically go to a search engine, rather than consider databases or books. Many of us at service desks have experienced students who need help at a computer and it turns out they are using articles from Wikipedia. This is a perfect opportunity to let them know about databases, such as the Biography Resource Center. There are times when a number of books about a subject or reference books go into much more detail than anything from a web page.

Assuming you have considered other options and still think a search engine would serve your needs, there are a number of search engines that you can try. A search engine is your tool for finding information that your customer needs and you want to be able to use the best tools available. The University of California Berkeley Library maintains and updates a page on recommended search engines. This Web site touches on three search engines and their features.

Most people find a search engine with which they have their best success and use it consistently. We’ll always be alert to a better search engine and willing to try out new ones when they surface, but for now, since most librarians informally polled at SLRC tours say they use Google the most, each month we’ll generally be taking a look at features that might enhance your Google searching.

But before we focus more on Google, keep in mind that when you are searching for images, you will often find very different content depending upon the search engine you use. This is an opportunity to try out some other search engines. Choose a subject or two of interest to you. Take a look at images on Yahoo, Exalead, Ask, Bing, as well as Google, or any other search engine and you will usually see that the results of your image search vary widely from one search engine to the next. The filters will vary from one site to another (size, color, type, Flickr, etc.), but you will have a larger number of results to view.

Is Google the best search engine for the Internet? What can I use other search engines for?

There are a number of search engines that you can use to help answer questions -- Yahoo, Ask, LiveSearch and Dogpile among them.  Most important is to be familiar with what you use regularly.

Assuming that you do use Google, try to know the basics and explore some of the advanced features. Google’s home page is very plain, but if you click on Advanced Search, there are many other options. You can search within particular domains (edu, org, etc.); kinds of files (Word, pdf, Excel, etc.); without certain words, and a variety of other possibilities. For reference you might use the translators, Google Books or Google Scholar. You can type a zip code, an area code, a currency conversion, a telephone number, and other common questions into the search box and find an answer. Google Maps and News offer good reference assistance also. Be sure to look at Advanced Search options when searching on each of the Google search.

Should you always use one search engine? If you’re looking for pictures or images, be sure to check others. Search engines process image requests differently so you might be surprised to see what results you get.

So regardless of which search engine you use, learn the features that will enable you to help your customers.