Get Your Search Engine Into Gear
Newcastle Herald
Monday August 6, 2001
Q I RARELY seem to be able to find what I am looking for when using the search engines. Is it me or am I doing something wrong? A THE primary goal that all search engines strive for is relevance. They have been trying for years to develop very sophisticated methods of determining the content and, ultimately, the relevance of a website based on key words or phrases.
There are two things that people often do with search engines, which will, unfortunately, always produce poor results. They either put a single word in as a search condition, which returns simply millions of generalised results, or they submit a complete question as if they were talking to an intelligent human.
Your best results generally exist by using something in between. At Google.com for example, `insurance' is not as relevant a search phrase (15.5million pages) as `home insurance' (2million pages) which is not as good as `home insurance Newcastle NSW' (5790 pages).
If you really want to limit the number of pages and increase your chances of getting only relevant sites, use quotation marks to group phrases together, for example, ``home insurance' Newcastle NSW' which returns 29 pages.
Most search engines have an advanced search section which gives a large set of options for generating relevant results, for example, to search pages by language, modified dates, pages containing specific phrases, pages excluding specific phrases and so on.
Sometimes less is more, and that's when a directory may be better than a search engine. Yahoo! is the largest categorised directory or index of sites on the Internet that is actually assembled by humans instead of automated computer scripts. This means that fewer sites are in the directory than a standard search engine but the relevance tends to be very high as a result.
If you ask Yahoo! to search for a phrase, it will show you its directory results first but you can click on the `Web Pages` entry at the top if you want to see the results for the phrase from Google, which is an actual search engine.
Another very popular search method is to use a `metasearch engine' such as DogPile.com. A metasearch will submit your phrase to all the major search engines and bring back the top results from each all at the same time.
Finally, if you really want to learn the nitty-gritty about search engines, give www.searchenginewatch.com a try. David Williams is the Asia Pacific troubleshooter for Altitude Software. Send questions to david.williams@altitude.com.
© 2001 Newcastle Herald
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