Way back in October, I wrote a blog entry called Web Searching 101, outlining some basic web searching tricks using Google, but mentioned that some techniques work better with other search engines, for example AltaVista, and I promised to write a follow-up, Web Searching 201. Better late than never, so here goes…
A simple Google search may appear to give you the most relevant hits first, but that is not necessarily the case. A number of techniques can be used to (artificially) improve a site’s page rank, i.e. how high on the list of hits it appears. For companies with an online presence, getting a high page rank has enormous potential to increase traffic to their site and thus (hopefully) boost their business. Not surprisingly, SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) are in high demand these days.
Most often, when Internet users do a web search, they just choose one of the first few links that appear and don’t even bother going to the second page of hits. In some cases that’s fine, but they should be aware that a carefully crafted search algorithm has determined the order of the results you get, thus the results necessarily contain a certain bias.
All Internet users will benefit from learning how to formulate search criteria to target their search more carefully, and this is something we all ought teach our students specifically before sending them to the lab to do research.
Here are some powerful ways to get a lot more out of your web search engine. (Note: all these examples are for using the search engine http://www.altavista.com.)
- Domain search:
- Rather than searching the whole of the Internet, you may sometimes want to look for different points of view by limiting your search to only one domain at a time, thus allowing you to deliberately choose your bias and compare and contrast different points of view.
- For example, to leave out commercial sites and only search academic sources, search only within .edu sites. Beware though that not all educational institutions are within the .edu domain, so you may be limiting the search too much.
- You can also search within a country domain, which is extremely useful. A general search in English will normally return Internet sources with a certain Western bias. Limiting the search to only a particular country domain allows you to override this bias and find sources from other regions with possibly different viewpoints.
- For example, the search terms “oil war” will likely give markedly different information when searching only Iranian web sites rather than a general search for the same terms. Nearly all the sites on the first page of hits for a general search for this term are US-based. If, on the other hand, you limit the search to the domain .gov (which is US governmental entities and agencies, such as the White House and the CIA factbook), you get a different perspective again.
- Example: search AltaVista for “domain:ir oil war” or “domain:gov oil war”
(Note: don’t include the quotation marks; no space between the colon and the domain) - For a list of all top-level and country domains, click here: List of Internet Domains on Wikipedia
- Host search:
- You can search only within a particular website, e.g. only our official ISM site or only the United Streaming site. This allows you to do a targeted search on a particular topic within a large site that you know to be reliable.
- Example: enter the search terms “host:direct.gov.uk Falkland” or “host:teachers.tv algebra”
(Note: don’t include the quotation marks; no space between the colon and the domain) - These examples search for information about Falkland within the direct.gov.uk site and for videos or information about algebra within the educational video site www.teachers.tv.
- Link search:
- One way to evaluate a website is to see which other sites on the Internet link to it, i.e. which websites consider this site to be an authority (or at least worthy of mention in one way or another).
- A powerful example of how important this can be comes from Alan November, who relates the (true) story of 14 year old Zack, who was writing a paper stating that the holocaust never happened, and had found an online source from within Northwestern University’s website. As it turned out, the particular page Zack had come across in his Internet searching had been penned by a NWU professor of Engineering. Given the position of the author (Professor, albeit not in a relevant field) and the wider context of a reputable University, Zack had never thought to question the authority or motives of the author, who was actually using the page to advocate some very specific political points of view. Obviously, we draw on a number of different skills when evaluating online sources, and maturity comes into play as well, but had Zack searched for incoming links, he would have found 879 websites pointing to this professor’s web site, a large number of which are devoted to white supremacy, KKK and Aryan Nationalist Skinheads.
- Example: if you search in AltaVista with the term ”link:http://diligence.wordpress.com“, you will find that as of April 1, 2008, there are 605 webpages containing links to Mark Dilworth’s blog.
- Searching for keywords in the title or URL:
- You can perform searches that look for keywords in the title of a web page or in the URL itself.
- In many ways these are similar and probably overlapping search results - a page providing an overview of the subjunctive in French grammar will likely have the word “Subjonctif” in the title, and the URL may well also contain this term (e.g. www.nvcc.edu/home/lfranklin/subjonctif.htm). Experimenting with both will probably give you the best chance of finding what you need.
- Example: the search expressions “title:subjonctif” or “inurl:subjonctif” will search for web pages devoted to the topic of the grammatical form subjunctive.
Students and teachers benefit from learning these skills, and it’s probably more effective for students to learn these skills in the context of a range of different subjects.
Image Source: http://flickr.com/photos/marcelgermain/2217801604/ (Creative Commons license)
