The Little Search Engine that Could

Is it pure ego or is it the ultimate test of a search engine? Type in your name and see who's talking about you in cyberspace. For me, the winning search tool was Dogpile. Dogpile found my name and the title of one of my books at the top of the best-selling list of an obscure cyberbook store in Japan. (Titan, the Life of John D. Rockefeller was 21 on the list).

Since I tend to favor anyone/anything that flatters me, I try to give Dogpile my search business. Besides liking the name Dogpile in particular, I am a big fan of metasearch tools in general.

A metasearch tool is one that simultaneously (instantaneously it seems) searches other search engines and compiles the results for you. Once I discovered Metacrawler and Dogpile, I never returned to Yahoo or Excite and their tiresome categories and irrelevant pages of results. Metacrawler searches Yahoo and Excite and five other search engines. Dogpile sorts through 25 engines. Why begin your search in the stacks when there's an on-line card catalog?

The long lists of categories in Excite and Yahoo could be turned into a lesson on classification for your students, but they, like the rest of us, will get click fatigue trying to find a useful piece of information. Finding that elusive, but perfect piece of useful information is the goal of the exercise. Here are some tips to make your searches more efficient and more relevant.

Use the right words

Stop me if you've heard this one: The more precisely you define your search, the better the results. A single word will get you a lot of unwanted results. Can you imagine how many references there would be to the key word test? Try a phrase and put the phrase in quotes, "standardized tests." Correct spelling is a plus.

The most generous search engine is askjeeves. Here you or your students can type not just a word, but a whole question (What is the TOEIC?) and it will even check your spelling for you. The series of prompts make it a very user friendly search tool. Not all of the results are relevant though, but it is easy to find those that are.

Use operators

To further refine your search, use operators. These vary from search engine to search engine (their help files will help you here). The most common operators are: "standardized tests" You will be given any document where these two words appear together in a document.

AND

standardized AND tests
You will be given any document where these two words appear together in a document. The "+" character can replace AND with the same results.

OR

TOEIC OR TOEFL
You will be given any document where either TOEIC or TOEFL is mentioned.

NOT

TOEIC NOT GMAT
In your search of standardized tests, any document that contains GMAT will be excluded from your search. The "-" character can replace NOT with the same results.

Some search engines allow a wild card which will give you all variations on a word: test* (test, tests, testing). Note that caps are important.

Use new browser windows

Tired of waiting for the research results window to reload? Once you've done your search and before you click on the results, open a new browser window and cut and paste the URL in the new window. Then if the document is a dud, you click back to your result window and get the URL of another document. It's a real time saver.

Use Help files

When you find a search engine you like, read their help file. There you can learn advanced search techniques particular to that engine.

www.hotbot.com
www.altavista.net
www.infoseek.com
www.metacrawler.com
www.dogpile.com
www.askjeeves.com