Smarter Searching

The Evolving Internet

How Search Engines Work
• Crawler-Based- Create their lists
automatically by “crawling” the web and
people sort through the results.

• Human-Powered Directories- Depends

on humans to write a short description of the
site to be added to the directory.

• Social Search-NEW Determines relevance

based on the contributions & interactions of
users.
The BIG Four
• Google- Crawler-based service is the top
choice for most searchers. Tons of features:
blogs, scholar, images, books, maps, etc.
• Yahoo- Web’s oldest directory & now
integrates a crawler. Becoming more of a
media company than SE.
• Windows Live Search (MSN Search)-
Prides themselves on being “more precise”.
• Ask.com (AskJeeves)- Let’s you use “natural
language” to ask questions & provides the
right answer.
Meta-search Engines
Searches are sent to several SEs all at once
and blended onto one page.

• Dogpile- Customizable listing.

• Vivisimo- Organizes pages into categories.
• Kartoo- Shows the results with sites being
interconnected by keywords.
• SurfWax- "SiteSnaps" feature, you can
preview any page & see where your terms
appear in the document. Allows results to be
saved for future use.
All-in-One
Not a true meta-crawler, but allows you to
compare results from numerous SEs at once.

• TwinGine- displays the search results of the

two most popular SES, Google and Yahoo,
side by side.
• Google vs Yahoo Tool- Visually compares
results.
• Proteus- Send your search to one of several
search engines.
Visual Searching

• Clusty- Takes broad search topics and

“clusters” display results into sub categories.

• Grokker- Graphic organizer for results using

sub categories to help display hits.
News Search Engines
These services provide exceptionally good
results for current event searching, because
they crawl only news sites. The results are
usually focused and timely.

• GoogleNews
• YahooNews
• AllTheWebNews
• AltaVistaNews
• DayPop
• NewsMap
Social Searching
• Del.icio.us- Store and organize all of
your bookmarks, share with others.
• MyWeb- Social tagging powered by
Yahoo.
• Rolloyo- Create a customized search
engine.
• Eurekster- Community powered
search engine.
Get the most out of your search
Using the Advanced Options
• Use "phrase searching" whenever possible
• Add more words to focus results
• Try a title search for subject focus
• Limit to .edu or .gov to exclude most
ecommerce sites
• Use link search to find who links to a specific
page
• Use the advanced search forms, or at least
look to see what it offers. They often include
ability to limit search to title, a specific
domain, or do a link search.

http://searchengineshowdown.com/strat/advancedsearch.shtml
Learn the Language

• Boolean Searching refers to how

multiple terms are defined in a search.

• Each SE has their own language and

different search capabilities.
http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/
Search Toolbars
• Provide direct access to search engines
from within your browser. Most major
SEs have a downloadable bar you can
add to your desktop.
• Meta-search utilities make it easy to
search more than one SE at the same
time.
– Groowe -It’s default is set to include the
top 16 SES.
– Advanced SearchBar- Access to 60 SEs.
What’s New?
• Web 2.0- Second generation of web-based
communities such as social networking sites,
wikis and folksonomies that facilitate
collaboration and sharing between users.
• Mashups- A website or web application that
combines content from more than one
source.
• RSS feeds- Really Simple Syndication makes
it possible for people to keep up with all of
their favorite sites with one click.
Not all searches are the same

Try to use a new one each month so you

can familiarize yourself with the
features of each, you’ll be surprised at
the different results each will present!
Cool Tricks and Tips
• Google synonym finder-
– Syntax is: ~word
• Example ~obesity ~kids
Will retreive obese, diet, weight, diabetes,
overweight, childhood, child, children, youth
• Yahoo’s Mindset Feature-
– Are you researching or shopping?
http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/
• Fill in the blank-
– * can be used as a fill in for any words you
may have missed.
Get Busy
Basic Internet Searching
Advanced Internet Searching

By: Greg R. Notess

http://searchengineshowdown.com/strat/basicsearch.html