Specific Question: is a question that you can phrase easily and one for which you will recognize the answer when you find it. You narrow the search down to the answer you seek.
Search Strategy:
Start with broad categories of information and gradually narrow the search until you find the answer to your question.
Search Strategy:
Start with general questions that lead to other, less-general questions. The answers should lead you to more information about the topic in which you are interested, which leads you to more questions.
Search Engines work by entering a word expressing or a query in the search field. The engine will then search its database for the query and return the "hits" results to the screen. A hit is a Web page that is indexed in the search engine's database and contains text that matches your search expression.
Search Engines use a Web robot ( bot, spider) to build its database. A Web bot is a program that automatically searches the Web to find new Web sites and update information about old Web sites already in the engine's database.
Exercise in book URL is http://www.course.com/NewPerspectives/Internet/cmp/t04.html
Book takes you through a couple of exercises using a couple of different engines. Search topic from book is Belize annual rainfall.
Each search engine might return different values. This is because some engines will only return hits within their own database (AltaVista) while others another might return hits for pages that include all of the words in your search expression (HotBot)
Each search engine searches for Web pages differently. Many search engines robots only search keyword fields, while other will search the actual text on the web page itself.
Meta tag is HTML code that a Web page creator places in the page header for the specific purpose of informing Web robots about the content of the page. Meta tags exist solely for the purpose of search engine robots.
Full text indexing is when a search engine stores the entire content in its database. Not all engines to this.
Note: Often times the engine uses keywords, and if you don't search by these keywords, the engine will not return a hit.
Search Engines Include:
AltaVista AOL NetFind Excite HotBot Infoseek Lycos Northern Light Snap WebCrawler PlanetSearch Filez
Directories are a listing of hyperlinks to Web pages that are organized into hierarchical categories. People select the web pages in search (Web) directories. An "expert" decides when a web page is important enough to add to a directory and they also decide which category to place web page.
If you know the category you want to search, directories can be a good tool, otherwise, you might search through endless and useless "stuff" before you find what you need.
A Meta-Search engine is a tool that combines the power of multiple search engines, which might include directory search engines too.
Here's some food for thought...Each search engine...
uses a different Web robot to gather information about Web pages.
One of the more comprehensive meta-search engines is Dogpile. If you type in Belize annual rainfall in dogpile's search field you will find the results very different than when we entered it into AltaVista's search. The reason is AltaVista searches for pages with all three words while dogpile queries the phrase. This is why it is really important to read the help files of each engine.
Boolean operators specify the logical relationship between the elements they join. There are three basic Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT.
A precedence operator or an inclusion operator clarifies the grouping (order) within a complex expression and is usually indicated by the parentheses symbols or double quotation marks.
Proximity operator lets you search for terms that appear close to each other in the text of the Web page. NEAR is a proximity operator.
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The book (Web 4.21) wants us to perform a more advance search using AltaVista.
Steps to take:
Refine our search:
How HotBot performs more advance searches: