LESSON 4: CONTEXTUALIZED ONLINE SEARCH AND RESEARCH SKILLS

Being a vast sea of information is one of the key features of the Internet. It is such a big repository of
data that it is believed that one could find out something about anything on the Internet. Developing
the necessary knowledge and skills in online searching, however, is the key to maximizing its use.

ENRICH YOUR KNOWLEDGE

SEARCH ENGINE

A search engine is a software system designed to search the Internet for documents related to the
keyword or search word used or entered into the system. Users are able to maximize the potential
of search engines by learning the proper searching protocols.

TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINES

 Crawler - based search engine - It uses a spider or a crawler to search the Internet. The crawler
digs through individual web pages, pulls out keywords, and then adds the pages to the search
engine's database. Google and Yahoo are its examples.
 Directories- depend on human editors to create their listings or database. There are two types of
directories: (1) academic and professional directories which are often created and maintained by
subject experts to support the needs of researchers; and (2) commercial and portal directories
that cater to the general public and are competing for Internet traffic.
 Hybrid search engine - uses both crawler-based searches and directory searches to obtain their
results.
 Meta search engines - transmit user supplied keywords simultaneously to several individual
search engines to carry out the search. In this type of search engine, Duplicates can be
eliminated and clustering by subjects within search is implemented.

HOW TO SEARCH THE INTERNET EFFECTIVELY

Before doing a search, it is very important to first define the topic completely and concisely. The
following sections are the tips which you may consider when doing an online search:

1.Use of keywords - Determine which keyword works best, the recommended maximum is six to
eight carefully chosen words, preferably nouns and objects. Avoid verbs and use modifiers only
when they help to define your object most precisely.

2.Use of phrases - The most powerful keyword is a phrase, a combination of two or more words that
must be found in the documents being searched.

3. Capitalization -When searching for proper names, use capital or uppercase to narrow the search.

4.Boolean logic - is a powerful search to a reasonable number of results and increase the chance of a
useful outcome. The three most commonly used Boolean commands are AND, OR, and NOT. These
are used to search for items containing both terms, either term, or a term only if not accompanied
by another term.

5. Wildcards and truncation - This involves substituting symbols for certain letters of a word so that
the search engine will retrieve items with any letter in that spot in the word. The syntax may allow a
symbol in the middle of a word (wildcard) or only at the end of the word (truncation). Example:
“wom*n” may result to “woman" and “women," "invest*" may return invest, investor, investors,
investing, investment, investments.