Search Smartand You Can Find

Newcastle Herald

Monday August 14, 2000

By BRAD FULLER

Getting useful results from a web search can be more of an art than a science.

By some accounts there are more than 800million pages on the World Wide Web, with more than 15,000 search engines and directories trying to index their content in some fashion.

These range from all-inclusive sites with millions of pages listed, to smaller specialist sites developed for the use of the business and financial sectors, professions, media and others.

In addition to the index-based sites like google.com and altavista.com (with content supplied by web-crawling robots) there are the directories like yahoo.com, looksmart.com and lycos.com, where human editors categorise the content, and the new meta-search sites like ask.com and dogpile.com that pass your search through several of the other sites and show you the best results.

So ? how do you find what YOU are looking for?

It's important to realise that each search site uses different rules for indexing web content and for doing searches. This means that different sites will give different results for the same search phrase.

For instance, searching yahoo and altavista for the phrase `who was the first man in space' doesn't return a reference to Yuri Gagarin in the first page of results. Google returns several references that include his name, but only ask.com returns a page about him as the first result.

Always use a `phrase' or at least several words in your search to limit the number of results. Searching for `space' and expecting to find useful references to Yuri Gagarin is unrealistic to say the least! If your search returns thousands of results, don't be too concerned. The first page or two will be the best matches, and the titles of the results might give you an idea on how to improve your search phrase.

Use the most current search sites whenever possible. The web is constantly changing ? pages are removed and updated all the time, and older search sites often contain references to out-of-date or missing pages.

Learn how to use the `advanced' search options on your favourite site. Usually you can instruct the search engine to include `all words' in your search phrase or `any words'. For instance the search phrase `+the +first +man +in +space' tells altavista that all of these words must appear in the search result (and incidentally returns a Yuri Gagarin reference at the top of the results). Prefacing a word with a `?' means that the search word must NOT appear in the result ? this is a great way of culling unwanted search results and helping you zero in on the stuff you are looking for.

Different search sites use different advanced search options, and may have an `advanced search form' where you can specify these types of options interactively without needing to learn special rules.

Try the same query on several search sites (or meta-search sites) before giving up.

Brad Fuller is a web developer with Internet Image, a Newcastle company specialising in website design. E-mail him at webmaster@iimage.net.au

Next column: `Getting found': The art of search engine placement.