Effective Search Techniques

1. SEARCHING KNOWN CITATIONS

If you already know the title of your work you can search it in the title field.

2. SEARCHING BY TOPIC: Use search connectors

When searching by topic, use the AND and OR search connectors (Boolean searching) to get
the best search results.

3. AND

Use AND between search terms to find records that use all of the terms.

4. OR

To be sure that you find all articles on your topic, use OR between search terms to search for
synonyms of a concept, e.g., search for job OR career OR position.

5. NOT

If your search results contain items that you want excluded, you can use the NOT connector.
Say you are searching for articles on mariners, and keep getting results for the Seattle Mariners
baseball team. Searching for mariners NOT Seattle will exclude those results. Note that NOT
should be used sparingly, as it can unintentionally exclude relevant results.

6. PHRASES

If you want to search for a multi-word phrase, use quotation marks around the words to get
results that use the words in exactly that order.

7. TRUNCATION

To make sure you get all variations of a word, use the truncation symbol. In most databases,
this symbol is an asterisk *.

8. SUBJECT TERMS

Searching with a human-chosen subject term can be much better than relying on a
mechanical word search. Electronic databases generally include pre-assigned subject terms for
each article.

SEARCH ENGINES
 1. Google

Google Search Engine is the best search engine in the world and it is also one of most
popular product from Google. Almost 70 percent of Search Engine market has been acquired by
Google. According to Alexa, google.com is the most visited site in the whole web.

2. Bing

Bing is Microsoft’s answer to Google and it was launched in 2009. Bing is also a good and
best search engine. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft’s web browser.This Microsoft’s
search engine provides different services including image, web and video search along with
maps.

3. Yahoo

Both Yahoo & Bing are not giving competition to Google but giving competition to each
other. According to latest report on net market share, Yahoo have a market share of 7.68percent.
Yahoo is still a leader in among most popular free email providers but does not able to convince
users in search engine area.

4. Baidu

Baidu is Chinese web search engine founded in January 1, 2000. This web search is made to
deliver results for website, audio files and images. Also Baidu has Alexa Rank of 4 . It also
provides some other services including maps, news, cloud storage and much more. It is also one
of the most used search engine in China.

5. AOL

Aol.com is also among the top search engines in the world. It has market share of 0.59
percent. Verizon Communication has bought AOL for $4.4 billion.The company also provides
advertising services as AOL Advertising and AOL Platform.

6. Ask.com

Ask.com was previously known ask Ask Jeeves. Its search results are based on question
answering web format. It was founded in 1995. In fact, it is a question & answer community. If
their resources don’t have the answer than it takes help from a particular third-party search
engine.

7. Excite
 Most of us don’t know about a search engine named “Excite”. Excite is an online service
portal. It provide internet services like email, search engine, news, instant messaging and
weather updates. It was launched in 1995.

8. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine known for protecting the privacy of the users. Its
revenue come from Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and Affiliates.

9. WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is computational search engine which does not give list of documents or web
pages as search results. But its results are based on facts & data about that query. It’s also called a
computational knowledge engine.

10. Yandex

Yandex is most used search engine in Russia. In fact it is an Russian internet company. It also
provides services like Yandex Maps, Yandex Music, online translator, Yandex Money and many
services.

11. Lycos

Lycos has a good reputation in search engine industry. Its key areas served are email, web
hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.

12. Chacha.com

According to Wikipedia, Chacha.com is a human-guided search engine. It was founded in

2006. You can ask anything in its search box and you will answered in real-time. It is similar to
question and answer. It also provides mobile search and marketing services.