Transcript Searching the Web The Problem "Trying to use the Internet is like driving a car down a narrow road in a snow storm,

Searching the Web
The Problem
"Trying to use the Internet is like driving a car down a
narrow road in a snow storm, a car in which the
windshield wipers and headlights don't work. All of the
signs along the highway are backwards and upside down
and of no help at all. Finally when you see someone
along the side of the road and stop for directions, they
can only speak to you stuttering in Albanian."
Web Spawns 1.5
Million Pages Daily
according to findings
from Alexa Internet
©2001 Google - Searching 1,610,476,000 web pages
Where to
search
Britannica.com includes the complete, updated Encyclopædia Britannica, the oldest and
largest general reference in the English language. Selected articles from more than 70 of
the world's top magazines--including Newsweek, Discover, and The Economist--provide
additional feature and current-events coverage. Our guide to the Web's best sites
includes more than 125,000 sites, and you can also search the text of more than 100
million Web pages to find more information. The Books in Print database is available
through Britannica.com, and you can follow links from these citations to order books online
from Barnes & Noble. All these databases, including a collection of special online
Spotlights, can be accessed through a single search.
LookSmart is an interactive guide designed to help you quickly find information on the Internet.
•Our directory links to more than 1 million of the most useful Web sites.
•The directory is updated every day by a large staff of editors who look for the best information on
the Web. Each site is reviewed for quality and placed into one of more than 70,000 categories.
•Beyond our directory, we give you access to an index of more than 100 million pages through our
search partners.
Yahoo is not a true search engine in the sense of having robots roam the WWW to index its
contents. Instead, Yahoo's directory is hand-catalogued from submissions by readers and from
Yahoo's own human surfers.
These are directories, rather than search engines,
like Google, Northern Light and alltheweb.
Northern Light users have access to the best and biggest database available. To
make sure it's the best, we've designed ways to access, organize, and present the
information and worked hard to eliminate spam, duplicate pages, and dead links.
And while we know that size isn't everything, we are proud that Northern Light has
been proven to have the largest index of Web pages available. While many of our
competitors are content to only index a portion of the Web, our software and
technology are optimised to continue to grow our database of Web pages to keep up
with the rapid growth of the Web. So when you search with Northern Light, you can be
sure that you're getting the most information available, organized and presented in the
most useful way, to find just what you've been searching for.
FAST Search - The leading information retrieval and delivery
solution, based on advanced indexing, aggregation, matching and
presentation technologies delivering the following capabilities:
Comprehensive Scope - Largest, most comprehensive Web
catalogue, indexing more than 600 million full-text Web pages
Freshness - Web index is completely updated every two weeks,
more frequently than any other search engine; updates for both
Internet and corporate data soon to be every two days
Highest performance - One of the fastest search response times on
the market
http://www.alltheweb.com/
Most web-pages are only
found by one of the big
search engines
Web Search Engines Rated
Hard to Find Stuff on the Web?
Louis Monier, technical director for Digital
Equipment Corp.'s AltaVista search engine,
said that Digital's internal Web studies
largely confirmed the results from the
Lawrence-Giles research.
"Each search engine only covers only a
tiny fraction of the Web so you should
use all of them," Monier said.
So we use meta-searches:
Ixquick searches many prominent engines simultaneously (in parallel).
Ixquick translates your search into each search engine's syntax.
You can perform natural language or complex boolean searches with
Ixquick. Ixquick supports phrases, wildcards, omitted terms, musthave terms, parentheses, and other modifiers such as NEAR, because
Ixquick knows which search engines can cope with which complex
searches.
Ixquick eliminates duplicates.
Ixquick awards one star for each search engine that placed a site in its
top ten. Since different search engines value different content, a site
that appears in multiple top ten lists is likely to be very pertinent!
How to
search
1. Use more terms
2. SEARCH ENGINE MATHS
cancer: 3,843,330 pages
+cancer +horoscope: 62,320 pages
+ AND
+chocolate cake +recipe: 38,885 pages
- NOT / AND NOT
+"chocolate cake" +recipe –nuts: 6,105 pages
" " PHRASE
gorbachov: 2,426 pages
"mikhail gorb*": 12,562 pages
* WILDCARD
Or 3. Use Boolean Searching
AND: e.g. cancer AND horoscope
OR: e.g. ireland OR eire
NOT: e.g. chocolate AND cake AND recipe NOT
nuts(some search engines use AND NOT)
NEAR: e.g. peanut NEAR butter
(): e.g. adopt AND (beagle OR terrier)
4. Other clever tricks!
domain: page must be located at a .com or
.gov or .edu or .uk (etc.) computer e.g.
domain:uk will find uk based sites
host: page must be located on specific
computers e.g. host:nytimes.com will
retrieve pages on www.nytimes.com
image: page must contain an image whose
file name contains the specified text.
More Problems?
Each search engine uses
these terms differently.
Where to find
out more
Use www.ixquick.com
Example searches:
Pokemon
Ixquick awards each site one star for each search engine that placed it in its top ten for your search, clearly indicating
the quality of the result. Ixquick lists each of these search engines and the website's place on each engine's top ten
list.
Britney Spears AND NOT nude
Ixquick understands the AND, OR, NOT and other modifiers, translates your search request so each search engine
will understand it, and doesn't forward your request to engines that can't understand it. Result: relevant results.
Veget*rian
Ixquick knows which search engines can handle wildcards, multiple wildcards, wildcards in phrases, wildcards at the
start of a word, and more. Ixquick will translate and forward your searches exclusively to the search engines that can
properly respond to them. Result: relevant results, and you don't have to learn the intricacies of each search engine.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.notess.com/search/
Web searching: a tutorial
on search strategy and syntax
http://powerreporting.com/altavista.html