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SEARCH TOOLS
   

What are you searching?

Finding the Web documents (a.k.a. Web "pages" or "sites") you want can be easy or seem impossibly difficult. Part is due to the sheer size of the WWW and because the WWW is not indexed in any standard vocabulary. Unlike a library's catalogs, which generally use standardized subject headings to help users find books. In Web searching you are always guessing what words will be in the pages you want to find or guessing what subject terms were chosen by someone to organize a web page or site covering some topic.

To efficiently search the Internet, a search tool is extremely important.  No one search tool can search the entire Web so it might be necessary to use several before you gather the information needed.
   

Types of search tools:
Type of Search Tool Characteristics Examples
Subject Directory
  • Human-selected sites picked by editors (sometimes experts in a subject)
  • Often carefully evaluated and kept up to date, but not always -- frequently not if large and general
  • Usually organized into hierarchical subject categories
  • Often annotated with descriptions (not in Yahoo!)
  • Can browse subject categories or search using broad, general terms
  • May not get to  full-text documents. Searches need to be less specific than in search engines, because you are not matching on the words in the pages you eventually want. In Directories you are searching only the subject categories and descriptions you see in its pages.

 
Search Engines & Meta-Search Engines
  • Full-text of selected Web pages
  • Search by keyword, trying to match exactly the words in the pages
  • No browsing, no subject categories
  • Databases compiled by "spiders" (computer-robot programs) with minimal human oversight
  • Search-Engine size: from small and specialized to 90+ percent of the indexable Web
  • Meta-Search Engines quickly and superficially search several individual search engines at once and return results compiled into a sometimes convenient format. Caveat: They only catch about 10% of search results in any of the search engines they visit.

 

 
     

 

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