Advanced Techniques for Web Searching

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Advanced Techniques for Web Searching

• Kristen Mastel
• 612-626-9843
• meye0539_at_umn.edu
• MINITEX Reference Services
• mtxref_at_umn.edu
• 800-462-5348
• ELM is brought to you by your local library or
  school media center, the MINITEX Library
  Information Network, and State Library Services
  (the Minnesota State Library Agency) with state
  appropriations to the Minnesota Office of Higher
  Education and the Minnesota Department of
  Education and federal LSTA funds under the
  support of the Institute of Museum and Library
  Services.

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Objectives

• Databases
• Overlap
• Search Switching
• Spread
• Advanced Features
• Phrase/Proximity/Boolean
• Truncation, Date Searching
• Field Link Searching

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Overlap

• Between the majors?
• Good for
• Organization home pages
• Major pages, frequently visited sites
• Not so good for
• Pages buried deep within sites
• Forum, social network pages
• www.Searchengineshowdown.com/blog/overlap/

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Example

• Phrase search for a name
• Ask results 235
• Live results 118
• Yahoo! Results 915
• Google Results 543

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Search Switching

• Between vendors
• Search box
• Search services
• Bookmarklets
• Within one system
• Tabs
• More
• Betas

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Between Vendors

• Web
• TurboScout www.turboscout.com
• Intelways www.intelways.com
• Zuula www.zuula.com
• Trovando www.trovando.it
• Bookmarkets www.searchengineshowdown.com/bmlets/
• Geo Searching
• Flash Earth www.flashearth.com
• Book Searching
• Booksearchx3 www.kokogiak.com/booksearch

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Switching within

• Use tabs
• Look under more

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Advanced Features

• Phrase/Proximity/Boolean
• Truncation,
• Date Searching
• Field Link Searching
• Google URL Tricks

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Phrase Searching

• Still most powerful advanced command
• Can combine with single terms
• use quotes to find phrases of multiple words
• Over quote warning
• nace salary survey fall 2007

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Boolean Basics

• Default operator AND
• Add more words for fewer results
• Use for NOT, with no space
• Search research
• UPPERCASE operators AND, OR, NOT
• Full, nested Boolean at
• Yahoo!, Live, Gigablast, Exalead

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Trunc/Word Variants

• Truncation only at Exalead with
• At the end of a term only
• Minimum three characters first
• Stemming (grammatical variants)
• Often automatic at Google
• Varies over time
• Use to turn off, maybe

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Extra Truncation Tricks

• OR most common forms of term
• Exalead Advanced Offers
• Phonetic Search
• Approximate Spelling

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OR Options

• OR almost everywhere
• Can use for OR at Google, Live
• At Google for synonyms
• Doesnt work with all words

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Plus Functionality

• In most cases, has no functionality
• No longer use as an AND
• Other functions
• Include stop words not in phrases
• Turn off stemming

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Best Use of Boolean

• Use well and sparingly
• Often best when combined with
• Field Searches

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Proximity

• Basic Phrase Searching
• NEAR at Exalead 16 word proximity
• NEAR/5 for 5 words (can use any number)

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Wild Card Word in Phrase

• Available only at Google and Yahoo!
• Use for the unknown word in a phrase
• search well wise
• Can use several (Google only)
• search well wise)
• Inconsistent

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Date Searching

• Google change to date 1st seen
• Or last changed
• Google advanced search
• More choices
• Still inaccurate

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Field Searching

• HTML Title intitleword
• Domain name Siteedu or sitetax.gov
• Part of URL inurlfindme
• Google File type filetypeppt
• Yahoo! File type originurlextension ppt

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Link Searching

• Google Partial results only
• Live Used to work well
• Link , linkdomain inurl
• Yahoo best bet!
• Linkhttp//www.saintpaulnagasaki.org
  -sitehttp//www.saintpaulnagasaki.org

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In Google Results URL

• Change as_qdr
• dnumber past number of days
• wnumber past number of weeks
• ynumber past number of years
• as_qdry3
• For the past 3 years

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More Google URL Tricks

• Add filter0 to turn off clustering
• Change num100 to see more results
• Add pws0 to turn off personalization
• Image searching
• Add imgtypeface to limit to faces
• Add imgtypenews for news photos

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Google Alerts

• Create an alert on search strategies or Google
  tips, ticks or hacks

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Wikia

• http//alpha.search.wikia.com/
• Live January7
• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
• Open source search engine
• results poor and thin
• Mini articles i.e. Google

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Search Engine review
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Thank you for attending this session!

• Questions/ Comments?

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Credits

• Greg Notess
• Web searching Advanced Techniques for Google and
  Beyond (SLA webinar)
• Teaching Web Search Skills Techniques and
  Strategies of Top Trainers

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Readings of Interest

• Search Engine Showdown www.searchengineshowdown.
  com
• Information behaviour of the researcher of the
  future
• Google generation is a myth
• http//www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/r
  eppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf
• Search for Google Search Secrets
• http//blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-08-11-n67.html
  
• Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks
• http//lifehacker.com/339474/top-10-obscure-google
  -search-tricks