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Mastering Online Searching: A Guide to Effective Search Strategies

In the digital age, knowing how to search effectively is essential for finding quality information. This guide explores key strategies to enhance your online searching skills. Learn how to define your mission, strategize with search tools, refine your queries, and evaluate information quality. Discover the power of Boolean operators, the benefits of advanced search techniques, and how to leverage subject directories and subscription databases. With these tips, you can navigate the web more efficiently, avoiding overwhelming results and honing in on what you truly need.

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Mastering Online Searching: A Guide to Effective Search Strategies

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Presentation Transcript

  1. Never-ending Search: (What you REALLY need to know about online searching) Ms. Emili 2009-2010 school year

  2. Why do we need to know this?? Just because you live on the Web,doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to use it more effectively!

  3. FSRE (for sure?) • Focus: mission or question • Strategize: search tools? Key words? • Refine: improve! Narrow, broaden, etc. • Evaluate: quality of information ok?

  4. Good searchers… • Mine their results • Consult several search tools • Use advanced search • Use search strategies • Modify their results

  5. Pre-process your search terms

  6. What the heck does “Boolean” mean?

  7. So, basically… • AND: requires ALL words to appear = less results, more specific • OR: captures ANY of your search words = more results, less specific OR

  8. When do I use which?? AND: use this to limit your search; narrow your topic; find more specific information OR: use this as a broad, beginning search; capture synonyms; find more results if you’re not getting enough hits

  9. Using exact phrases • Don’t overuse this strategy! Not every group of words is a phrase (use and/or instead) • Phrases, names, titles • Ex. “vitamin A” “George Washington” “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”

  10. Why use “advanced search”? • Limits your results • Able to search by field • Title, domain, etc. • http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

  11. Tips for advanced searchers • Search within • Use “find” to search within a page of full text • Field searching • Title, subject tags, etc. • Word stemming: • Wom*n

  12. A field guide to search tools • Search engines: databases of billions of Web pages, gathered automatically. Broad, often overwhelming results. • Subject directories: links to resources arranged by subject. Browse through. Selected, evaluated, maintained by humans (often experts!) • Subscription databases: provided by libraries. Reference materials, journal and newspaper articles, etc.

  13. Subject directories: when to use them • When you’re just starting out (“Civil War”) • When you want to get to the best sites on a topic quickly • When you’re looking for annotations • When you want to avoid all the noise of search engines

  14. Two Essential Directories • Librarian’s Index to the Internet • http://lii.org • Internet Public Library (IPL) • http://www.ipl.org/ • Well-organized, selective, continually updated collection. Maintained by librarians.

  15. Search Engines: when to use them • When you have a narrow topic or several keywords • When you’re looking for a specific site • When you want a large number of documents • When you want to use advanced search features

  16. Search engines have limitations! • Not every page of a site is searchable • Paid placement/sponsored results distract from real results • Lots of “noise”- too many irrelevant results

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