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February, 2002 ESSENTIALS |
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SEARCH ENGINES The Right Info With an estimated 300 million Web sites on the Web, searching for relevant information can be intimidating. But knowing just a few basics can help you improve your results dramatically. By Alay Pankaj Jhaveri
To check the skill levels of people using search engines, I asked nine people (six college students, two marketing executives and a CEO of an import-export company) at a cyber café to search the Web for the English newspaper with the longest name. I gave them 30 minutes, in which time they had to copy the name of the newspaper into a notepad file and print it. I knew this was a difficult question. But this is the kind of information that people seek on the Web. To my amazement, three people printed out the right name within eight minutes. The others could not find the newspaper's name in all of 30 minutes. No doubt they lacked some basic skills in searching the Web, like many users of the Web. But by choosing the right search engine and following simple steps, you can make your search relevant and fast. Be specific The most effective searching strategy is to be as specific as possible; don't be afraid to tell a search engine exactly what you are looking for. The most important tip that will make your search smoother is to pick your search engine appropriately. There are three basic types of engines: search engines, subject directories and meta search engines. Search engines: These are best used for finding a specific item, for example, the HP Deskjet 610c printer. They are also a good place for looking up a specific Web site's URL. These engines usually do not have sites grouped by subject. The biggest drawback is that results tend to be larger than a subject directory and may include non-relevant sites. Subject directories: Best used for finding general information, for example, on printers. They are good places to begin a search if you don't have many specifics. Information is selected and grouped by a human intermediary. You can see what other people most often choose in your particular subject area. Meta search engines: These use tools that check various other search engines and return a listing of the Web pages that scored highest based on an aggregate keyword relevance score. Although they are convenient, they allow less control than a search engine. Some allow you to choose the specific engines you wish to search, which can be good if you want to limit the results. Pick your engine or directory correctly:
Although all engines operate in similar ways, they have their fortes. A closer look will reveal differences in the number of Web sites contained in an engine's database, the thoroughness in covering particular topics, the speed of the search, and the relevance of the responses as a result of a search. Different search engines tend to catalogue their information in different ways. Search engines Search engines function by using automated agents called robots or spiders, which make their way through the Web, looking for information from individual sites. There is no perfect search engine and you should use different search engines for different tasks. AltaVista (www.altavista.com): AltaVista is considered to be the fastest and most comprehensive of all search engines. It will return hundreds of search results in seconds. While it attempts to rank results by relevance, users may need to wade through hundreds of results to find the information they want. Keep in mind that the first 20 are often considered the most relevant. AltaVista does an especially good job of searching academic and research sites. Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com): Ask Jeeves allows users to ask questions in natural language. It attempts to answer the questions that a user asks. It is helpful in answering basic technical questions. Ask Jeeves also lists top hits from eight other search engines at the bottom of the search page, giving you a quick overview of the results from a variety of engines. Direct Hit (www.directhit.com): Direct Hit works with other search engines to refine their results. It does this by monitoring what users choose from the list of search results. Sites with more hits are listed higher in Direct Hit's rankings. Therefore, it works in a similar way to Google's Directory and search engine. Excite (www.excite.com): Excite updates its entire database every week. Because it attempts to index only the most popular pages on the Web, Excite is a good choice if you are looking for large, popular Web sites. However, if you are looking for information likely to be found on obscure sites, use another search engine. HotBot (www.hotbot.com): HotBot enables a researcher to perform power searches and, like AltaVista, its database is large. In most cases, HotBot's first page of results comes from the Direct Hit service. It gets its directory information from the Open Directory project. InfoSeek (www.infoseek.com): InfoSeek allows users to submit a more defined Power Search, resulting in fewer but more targeted results. Also searches major newswires, premier news sources and company profiles. Northern Light (www.northernlight.com): Northern Light is another favourite search engine among researchers. It features one of the largest indexes of the Web, along with the ability to cluster documents by topic. Northern Light also has full-text documents that are not always available to other search engines. WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com): It offers speedy searches, but its database is small because it stores only the most popular sites. Thus, a search result may not be comprehensive, but, depending on what you are looking for, the smaller scope may make the results more useful. Subject directories Subject directories filter relevant information. The information in a subject directory is selected and sorted by a human intermediary. Content is broken down into large subject categories and subcategories. Subject directories are a good place to start your research. Yahoo (www.yahoo.com): Best known as a search engine, Yahoo is actually a hierarchical directory. Users can search the Web through Yahoo, but it works best for surfers who want to pick their way through organised lists of topic-specific resources. You can search the entire Yahoo site, or within each category. Google Directory (http://directory.google. com/): This new Google directory combines the technology of Google's meta search engine and derives its information from the Open Directory Project (ODP). The project is a volunteer-edited directory-experts volunteer to be editors of certain content areas. Unlike Yahoo's alphabetical listings, it has listings by order of importance-how many times a site has been linked by other high-ranking Web sites. The more links to a page, the higher the page-rank score. Meta search engines A meta search engine searches through different search engines' databases at the same time. Dogpile (www.dogpile.com): Gives you the option of searching through its Web catalogue, searching its open directory, or meta searching. It derives its information from the following search engines: LookSmart, Overture, Dogpile Web Catalogue, Dogpile Open Directory, Direct Hit, About.com, InfoSeek, Real Names, AltaVista, Lycos and Yahoo. Go2Net (www.go2net.com): Combines the relevance ranking system of Google, the file searching system of Dogpile and the breadth of Web sites covered by MetaCrawler. There is also a good Net address directory on the site. It is the meta search engine of all meta search engines. Google (www.google.com): Conducts searches across different search engines at once, and it delivers results that pay attention to the proximity of the search terms. This eliminates unnecessary filtering. Google also ranks its results based on the amount of hits per URL. ixquick (www.ixquick.com): It incorporates the ability to search in several other languages. You can also search for pictures, MP3 or news as categories. This is a timesaving feature if you are looking for specific information. Although there are several ways to obtain information on the Web, there might be times when you will throw up your arms in despair. That's when it is advisable to post your query to someone you know has the answer. Sometimes you really have to make that extra effort to get the information you want. Alay Pankaj Jhaveri, Web Developer and IT Consultant (with reports from Amit Ranjan Rai) |
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Search
engines are meant to save time while looking through the mountain of
information on the Web. But most Net surfers do not use search engines
properly, wasting their time searching for a specific item. To make
searches more meaningful and less time consuming, one has to know the
difference between various types of search engines and the technology that
drives them.
