Search School: Use Your Results

Searching for information online presents a problem for most people. Unless you have a good grasp on the information you are looking for already, it can be difficult to come up with some good search terms that eliminate irrelevant pages and brings the most specific and useful information to the first page of search results.

The Traditional Approach
The traditional method of dealing with this problem (pre search engine) is to read an article about your topic in an encyclopedia or other reference book. These types of articles give you a short, fact filled overview of the topic, giving you some good background knowledge of your topic. Libraries have many of the same materials in their research databases, most of them accessible from your computer at home. This is probably still the best method for getting started with your search, but it is not always realistic for all situations.

An Alternative Method
An alternative method requires you to be a bit of an information detective. You will have to look for clues to help you narrow your search as you go. When using this approach, you have to skim your search results for

1. page titles 
2. page snippets or excerpts
3. page URLs.

When you find a potentially useful website, you have to open and skim the page for:

1. useful keywords 
2. and useful facts to build on your search.

You goal is to get a better understanding of your topic and refine your search based on what you learn.

Example
Let's pretend that you have to do a research project on the Civil War. Your teacher has assigned you Andersonville as a topic. You don't know what this is because you didn't read the assigned textbook chapter and you forgot the book in your locker. Shame on you! Let's see if we can salvage the situation.

You go to Google and put Andersonville in the search box.

Your first job is to find out some basic information about your topic. If you skim the results on the first page, you will see there are results about the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, as well as historical information about a Civil War Historical site.

To find this information, I scanned:

1. the blue page titles and the green URLs (web addresses)
2. the web page excerpts beneath the titles.

The page titles are given by the person who created the page. The excerpts are selected by Google to show where your keyword shows up in the page in context.

Notice that there are three pages in a row that mention the Civil War in the description and/or title. If I click on these, I find some basic information that will help me learn a little more and expand or narrow my search.

Here are few things that I learned:

• Andersonville was a confederate prisoner of war camp during the civil war.
• It was officially known as Camp Sumter.
• Though it only operated for about 15 months, over 13,000 Union prisoners died of malnutrition, exposure and diseases. This seems to be why it is so famous.
• It was located in Georgia.

This information can help me narrow or expand the results. I know that any information that is not about the civil war prisoner of war camp in Georgia.

My original search had 893,000 results with a lot of irrelevant information. I might revise my Google search to:

Andersonville "civil war" camp Georgia

OR

"Camp Sumter" Georgia "civil war"

The first revision expanded the search to 7,530,000 results, but the results in the first several pages all appear relevant to the search. The second gave us some different results with only 27,400 results.

As I continue to read and collect web pages on the topic, I will have to decide whether to change my search terms to look for specific aspects of my topic.

For example, through my reading, I found that General Sherman's march through Atlanta helped to bring about the closing of the prison. If I wanted to find out more about Sherman's role, I might change my search:

Andersonville "civil war" camp Sherman

I would continue this cycle as I read and assimilate new information about the topic. Along the way, I am continually collecting new search terms and then changing the search so that can missing information about my topic.

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This is the last Search School post in this series on crafting a better search. Please check out the other posts in the series if you haven't already.

All Search School Posts So Far

Search School: Start Specific and Then Go General

Have you ever tried to order a pizza at a party? It can be difficult to accomadate everyone's preferences.

• Kevin likes a lot of different toppings. He prefers pepperoni AND sausage AND green peppers AND mushrooms AND extra cheese.
• Chris likes his pizza almost totally plain. He doesn't like meat that much. The pizza should NOT have pepperoni. He does NOT like sausage either. Vegetables are okay, but he does NOT like extra cheese.
• Sam isn't too picky. She wants pepperoni OR sausage. Green peppers OR mushrooms are good with her. 

Eventually, they decided on a pizza with green peppers AND mushrooms, but NOT with pepperoni OR sausage.

Believe it or not, this pizza ordering example also describes the type of thinking you need to do when coming up with a good search. Search engines use special commands called operators. These operators use a special language called Boolean logic. They help you tell the computer exactly what words you want or do not want to include in your search.

There are three basic boolean concepts you need to know to work with in a search engine: AND, OR and NOT.

As you think about your search, formulating search phrases and predicting your ideal search results, you should think about words that you think should show up on your web web page. But keep in mind that people sometimes use different words to say the same thing, so you need to think of synonyms to use in your search. And sometimes there are words that get in the way of your search too.

You can't explain which words to include or exclude to a search engine. It's just a dumb computer. But you can use the search engine operators to perform this task. Because the operators are a special language, we have to capitalize all the letters of the operator so the search engine can distinguish them from their normal use.

Let's say I want to look up information about penguins.I want to find inforamtion for a science report. So I want to include information on habitat, diet and other relevant information. So, I want the web page to include the words habitat AND diet.

An initial search for penguins also includes information on the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team. I do NOT want results that include the team. Also, the scientific classification name for penguins is Spheniscidae so I will include it. But I also want to include the common name penguines so that my search is broad enough to include pages that use the common OR scientific name. I wouldn't want to miss anything.

If I string all of that together, my search would look like this:
penguin OR Spheniscidae AND habitat AND diet NOT "pittsburgh penguins"

Search engines have their own way of expressing these operators. Google assumes that any words you put in the search box should be included in the page, so you don't have to put AND in the phrase, but you do have to use the OR operator. Instead of NOT, Google uses the minus sign (-) to indicate you want to exclude a word or phrase from your search.

So the same search in Google might look like this:
habitat  diet penguin OR Spheniscidae  -"pittsburgh penguins"

If you use the advanced search menu of most search engines, you don't even have to type in the operators. They usually have fields that do the same thing along with many other fields for tweaking your search.

Google's Advanced Search Screen

If you find that your search is returning no results, too few or the wrong information, strategically start to remove search terms and operators or use different ones until you get you want.

Search School: Make Predictions

So far in this Search School series, I have covered how to use words and phrases, not whole sentences, when searching. I have also showed how to use nouns, pronouns and words that are unique. This time I want to discuss making predictions when you search. In other words, ask yourself who would write a web page about the information you need and why?

Example

Let's say you are looking up information about giraffes. It is an assignment for your Biology class and you know you need some basic facts about your assigned animal and some other interesting tidbits as well.

Ask yourself, "who would want to share information about animals?"

People who work at zoos and scientists who study animals (zoologists) would be your best bet. Websites from zoos, natural history museums, organizations that protect wildlife and other places that would employ scientists or related careers would be good sources of information.

Based on these assumptions, you might try several different strategies. Search for…

giraffe	zoo
giraffe	"natural history museum"
giraffa camelopardalis (the scientific name you found in your textbook)
giraffe	factsheet
giraffe	conservation

 

More Strategies

You might ask these questions too.

Is your topic currently in the news?

Use a news search engine like Google News

Is it an historical event?

Look for sites that that specialize in history or online reference sources like Answers.com

Do you need results from research studies or scholarly analysis?

Try Google Scholar.

Do you need some quality resources or some assistance figuring out where to start?

Try Noodle Quest to plan a strategy. Or use Sweet Search to limit your search to high quality sites.

Or you could just as a librarian. We know a few things about searching too.

Search School: Use Unique Words

Review
In the last few posts, I discussed a process that begins with breaking a research question into individual concepts and then translating the concepts into keywords, or words that you will use for your search.

The keywords should be specific, and preferably, they will be nouns or proper nouns. Once you have accomplished these steps, you will do an initial search.

Unique Words
Have you ever noticed how many words there are for a person that is between the ages of 13 and 20? Most people refer to such a person as a teenager. But depending on the context and the writer, they might use several other words to describe the same person.

Medicine or Social Sciences	Adolescent
Teachers	Student or High School Student
Librarian	Young Adult
Your Grandmother	Young Person
Legal System	Juvenile
Another Teenager	guy / girl

Every community, profession or other group—baseball players, skaters, doctors, cheerleaders or music fans— has its own unique terminology that is shared by its members. When you are performing a search, think about what language a person who is familiar with topic might use when talking about the topic and include those terms in your search.

For example, you were given an assignment from your teacher to research information on an endangered animal. Your topic is wolves. Ideally, we want to find information from quality resources on science related websites.

Here are the results in Google for several different possible keywords:

Wolves - 119,000,000 hits
On the first page of results, there are some sites with information about gray wolves, but there are also several sports teams and other unrelated sites.

Gray Wolf - 7,390,000 hits
By being more specific, we narrowed the number of results considerably, but there are a few irrelevant results and several that are designed for elementary school students.

Canis Lupus - 3,300,000 hits
Finally, if we use the scientific name (used by scientists) for the animal, we get the smallest number of results and most of the sites are from science oriented sites or wildlife conservation organizations.

Practice Exercise:
Think of a topic that you are familiar with because of your interest or participation in a sport, hobby, profession or other community. Think of a general term that a person not familiar with the topic might use and do a search in your favorite search engine.

Now use the more specific term that is used by those who are familiar with the topic.

Compare the results to see which one has fewer, but more relevant, results.

Search School: Use nouns and proper nouns

Last time, I wrote about creating search queries that use a few essential words or short phrases instead of whole sentences. A strategy using a few, well thought out terms is generally the most effective way to narrow your search to find the information you need.

Once you narrow down your search to just a few concepts, you should then look at the words you have chosen. As a general rule, it is best to use nouns, especially proper nouns, in your search. Nouns are more concrete and specific than other words whose job it is to describe, modify or otherwise help out the nouns. 

Proper nouns are even better because, while nouns name a person, place, thing or idea, proper nouns refer to a specific person, place, thing or idea. 

The more specific and concrete your search terms, the better the search results.
Here is an example research question:

Why do we have Global Warming?

The first step is break the question into the essential components.

"Global Warming" AND [why do we have]

Global Warming is specific and would work great as a search term.  The second part of the question is a problem. "Why do we have" is too general, so we need to find a noun that has a more precise meaning.

causes 
reasons

These two would work.  If we know a little about the topic, we might able to predict that we might find information on CO2 emissions or pollution as possible reasons for global warming. We might also know (or find out) that some people refer to Global Warming with the broader term Climate Change.

These specific terms would give you different results, depending on which ones you use. It is a good idea to try out several different terms in your search to see what works best.

Practice Exercise:Use your favorite search engine do a search for the research question above. Try picking one term from each colum for each search. Which combination gives you most relevant results in the first 2 pages of results.

Search Term 1	Search Term 2
"global warming" "climate change"	causes reasons "CO2 emissions" Pollution

Search School: Words and Phrases, Not Sentences

Searchers usually take one of two approaches to doing a search. Beginning or less experienced searchers usually try typing a whole sentence or question into the search box This is called a natural language search because it mirrors how we naturally speak. For instance, a student using a natural language who is looking for information on the causes of the Second World War might use this query:

What were the causes of World War II?

On the other hand, a more experienced student searcher might use a keyword search. This type of search uses just one or two important (or key) words that the search engine will match against it index of pages.

causes "World War II"

A keyword search is usually more effective for a few reasons.

Non-essential Words: Remember that search engines look for all the words in your search query. If you said what were the major underlying causes of World War II, Google would assume that the words major and underlying have to be somewhere on each of the pages in your results.

Stop Words: Words like a, an, the, of, who, whom and similar words that do not have any meaning by themselves are usually ignored when you include them in your search. These are called stop words.

Precision: Focusing on just the essential concepts in your question allows you to be more precise in your thinking. Look at your search. Are your search terms too vague? Can you add a few words to tweak the search? This is harder to do with a sentence instead of a handful of words.

Phrases Searching: By default, a search engine will look for all of your words anywhere in the page. For instance, a search for World War II causes might return a page where all of your words show up different places in the page. So, the page might be one that says

The European powers divided up the world into various colonies…They were constantly at war…Two causes for this were…

This page might come from a web page about European Exploration instead of World War II.

For well-known phrases like World War II, the search engine will return relevant pages, but we want to eliminate irrelevant pages if we can. Putting quotations around any concept that has more than one word tells the search engine to make sure that only pages where the words are right next to each other on the page should be included in the results.

Practice Exercise

Here is a simple technique for modifying your search so that it only includes what you need for a good search.

1) Write out what you want to know in question form (natural language). Make sure to be as precise and specific as possible.

2) Go back and circle the most important concepts in the question—the 2 or 3 words that are the main ideas of the question. 

3) On a piece of scrap paper, write down the concepts from your question. Using your background knowledge, or after skimming a reference article (an encyclopedia article, Wikipedia, etc.) or textbook, brainstorm any synonyms or more general/specific ways to state the main ideas or relevant related concepts.

You now have several different ways to search for the same question.

 For more posts in this series, check out: How Search Engines Work and Crafting a Better Keyword Strategy



Search School: Crafting a Better Keyword Strategy

Last time I talked about how a search engine works behind the scenes to return search results. Please go back and review that post if you haven't read it yet.

Over the next several posts, I want to talk about picking the right keywords for your search so that you get more relevant search results.

Searching for information can be difficult because we often need to find answers for topics we don't know anything about in the first place. The best searchers use focused and specific keywords along with strategies to compensate for what they don't know about their topic.

Over the next several weeks, I will post information about 6 different techniques to help you craft a better keyword strategy.

Here is the list of strategies:
1) Words and phrases, not sentences
2) Use nouns and proper nouns
3) Use unique words
4) Make predictions
5) Start specific and then go general
6) Use your results

Search School: How a Search Engine Works

Welcome to Search School. Today, we begin a series of posts about searching electronic sources more effectively. If you asked around, you would probably find that most people (students and teachers alike) don't know how search engines work. Of course, most folks know how to put a few words in the search box and how to click on results. But they don't know how the search engines or LRC databases do their work behind the scences.

You don't have to be an expert, but having a general idea of how these programs come up with results can help you put together a better search, which leads to better answers. This video from Google gives a basic overview of how their search engine interprets your search and returns results. Although their approach varies slightly from other serach engines and library databases, the concepts are similiar enough.

Video Review

1. A search engine creates an index of web pages that it finds on the web (like a book index). 
2. The index makes note of the words on the page. 
3. When you do a search, the search engine matches the words you type in the search box with information in its index.
4. That means the pages in the search results contain your search words somewhere on the page and the more pages that have your keywords on them, the more results the search engine returns to you.

Next time, we will start a series of posts about how to formulate a better set of keywords.