MEDIA

World Wide Web Research Techniques

"Research is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought".

Search Engines

A search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs) The information may be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.

Several Internet Engines

• Yahoo



Yahoo offers search as part of a wider range of services that includes news and shopping.

• Bing

Bing has more extensive autocomplete results (where the search engine tries to narrow the search for you).

• Metacrawler

Metacrawler is a free search service that submits search questions to multiple search engines (eg., government sites, Internet sites, news sites, and specialty search engines) and then consolidates responses into a single view.

• Google

Google usually returns the greatest variety of results, and has by far the largest catalog of pages. The "Google Scholar" search engine allows users to search for academic articles that may be difficult to locate using a general search.

Use Specific Keywords

Keywords are the terms that you use to find content on the internet. Making your keywords as specific as possible will help your search engine to retrieve the information that you need. Say, for example, that you want to find a local art gallery that can display exhibit stand your work. If you type "art galleries" into your search engine, the results will include many pages of various art venues, whereas typing "free display art galleries" will return a more concise range of establishments . You can further refine your search by including other specific keywords. If you add your location, for example, you'll likely find someone local.

Simplify Search Terms

Some search engines include stop words in their searches. These are frequently used words such as prepositions (in, of, on), conjunctions (and, but) and articles (a, the), which mean that you'll end up with more pages in your search results than you need. So, it's usually best to eliminate stop words from your internet searches. The main exception is if you're looking for a specific title or name that includes them. Also, use the simplest form of the keywords that you're looking for, by avoiding plurals and verb forms with suffixes such as -ing, -s or -ed. For example, you would improve the quality of your search results by searching for "company" rather than "companies", or "pay"rather than"payed" or "paying".

Use Quotation Marks

Enclosing a search term within quotation marks prompts the search engine to search for that specific word or phrase. If the term is a single word, using quotation marks will cut out stemmed variations of it. For example, if you search for the word director, you'll likely receive a lot of results for direct, direction, directions, and so on, too. Typing "director" (with quotation marks), however, will ensure that you only get results for that stem word. Tip: Some search engines allow you to search for specific words by preceding them with the + symbol. Google no longer uses this function, but Yahoo, for example, does.

If the search term is a phrase, your search will be for that specific phrase, rather than for all the component words as individual items. So, for example, if you search for the phrase director of personnel, without quotation marks, your search will return results based on all of the words in the phrase (except of, which is a stop word.) Surrounding the term with quotation marks, however, will generate results that feature this specific term.

Remove Superfluous Words

Inserting a hyphen/small dash/minus sign immediately before a word excludes it from a search. So imagine, for example, that you're looking to find out more about dating. However, you want to concentrate on traditional dating techniques,whereasthe internet appears to be full of references to digital and social media dating, all of which are appearing in your search. Typing in marketing -digital will exclude digital from the search, making it easier for you to find the information you're looking for. Entering [dating -digital -social] would allow you to get rid of even more clutter.

Refine Internet Searches Using Operators

Other characters or terms, known as operators, allow you to narrow down your internet search in more targeted ways. Such as:

• Wildcard Searches:

Use the * symbol as a placeholder for another word. For example, searching for - * woman in the world - returns results for the richest woman in the world, the tallest, the oldest, and so on. Wildcard searches are also useful when you don't know the full text of a quote.

• Boolean Combination Searches:

The [OR] operator enables you to search for two or more terms simultaneously, and is most useful when those terms are very similar. Marketing, selling OR retailing, for example, will return pages where either of the terms is used,without both needing to be present.

Another way to combine searches is to use [AND]. This operator ensures that you receive only search results that include two or more terms. For example, the search "Apple Computers" AND "Rand Corporation" would only deliver search results that include the names of both companies.

Search a Specific Site: When you type site: followed by the URL of the website that you wish to search and a search term, you limit your search to a single website. For instance - site: Microsoft.com "personnel" will return all the pages from Microsoft.com that feature the term "personnel".

Finding Related Sites: Another useful operator is related: Typing this in front of a web address that you already know – as in related:Apple.com – will deliver a range of websites that are similar to Apple.com.

• Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) / Portable Document Format (PDF)

Every discpline posted on the "Arcturus Research Website" has a cross reference (highlighted blue) to the Library of Congress [LCSH] webpage. Using the appropriate LCSH along with PDF as a suffix coupled with any of the aforementioned research techniques in many instances retrieves relevant Internet resources (eg., (eg., Aeronautics PDF).

Finally, the Internet can be searched directly by accessing the {LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECT HEADINGS} and then encapsulating any subject heading located under any Subclass (Search icon will appear when subject heading is encapsulated: eg., encapsulate: Science)!
• Conclusion

When searching Internet, it's important to remember that many organizations now have staff members who are dedicated to improving their employer's visibility online. They are constantly adjusting the language of their websitesto coincide with the most commonly used keywords – a process known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Therefore, the websites listed at the beginning of given search results may have very good SEO, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll have the best relevant information. So, search results must be studied carefully.