Techniques For Using Search Engines
Basic Techniques
| Concept | Definition | Search Engines Exhibiting |
| Controlled vocabulary indexing | an indexer selects descriptors (subject headings) from a standardized list of headings | "simulated" in browsable subject trees |
| Thesaurus | a standardized list of subject headings used for a database | Not really |
| Keyword Indexing | automatic indexing of every word in a field or record | all robot-driven search engines (by definition) |
| Stopwords | words that are not indexed | All search engines exclude stopwords with the exception of InfoSeek and Open Text |
| "Implied Boolean" | Use of + to require presence of term, - to require exclusion of term | Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos |
| AND | search for records that include all of the terms (narrows the search) | Available through all search engines. Form-based in Lycos, Open Text and World Wide Web Worm |
| OR | search for records that include any of the terms (broadens the search) | Available through all search engines. Form-based in Lycos, Open Text and World Wide Web Worm |
| NOT | delete records that include this terms (narrows the search) | NOT not available in Lycos |
| Truncation | substituting "wild card" characters for one or more letters | Alta Vista, Lycos |
| Help | built-in general or context-sensitive help files with information about the database and search software | Available on all search engines |
| Concept | Definition | Search Engines Exhibiting |
| Proximity | requiring words to appear within a certain distance of each other | Alta Vista, Open Text, WebCrawler |
| Phrase Searching | using punctuation to require words to appear adjacent to one another and in a particular order | Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek and WebCrawler use ""
Open Text uses menu option "search this phrase" |
| Limit to particular fields | restricting search results to a subset of the database | Alta Vista, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, Open Text, World Wide Web Worm |
| Relevancy ranking | sorting by number of occurrences of a particular term, or by where the term appears within a search result (i.e. title, URL, etc.) | Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, Open Text |
| Case sensitivity | distinguishing between capital and lower-case letters | Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek |
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