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Mastering Online Searches: Strategies for Effective Information Retrieval

In today's information-rich environment, mastering online searches is crucial. Begin by clarifying your search context. Define why you're searching, which terms to use, and where to find information both online and offline. Learn to narrow or broaden your search effectively, and recognize when you've gathered sufficient information. Understand different search resources, including human-indexed and machine-compiled databases, and utilize Boolean logic to enhance your results. Explore subject-specific directories and search engines to optimize your information-seeking strategy.

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Mastering Online Searches: Strategies for Effective Information Retrieval

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Presentation Transcript

  1. Searching

  2. Preparing to searchAsk yourself… • Context: why are you doing the search? • Content: terms to use? • Who would have the information you need / where would you go “offline”? • How will you broaden or narrow your search? • How will you know when you’re done?

  3. Steps to Effective / Efficient Searching • Understand the database • Understand search resources • Human-Indexed Directory • Machine-Compiled Database • Understand search logic • Boolean connectors • Advanced search

  4. Quick tip: Looking at resultsKnow your .’s • Domain Names • www.epa.gov/ • www.globalwarming.org/ • www.climatecrisis.net/ • www.afcee.brooks.af.mil/ • www.newscientist.com/ • www.defra.gov.uk/ • www.europa.eu

  5. Understanding Search Sites • Search sites types • Human-indexed • Machine-indexed • What do they cover? • General • Subject specific • Types of material • How far back do they go?

  6. Search Sites – Human Indexed • Human editor • Subject categorized / organized • Less information to search from • Comparing • Using • General - Yahoo Directory (sleep deprivation)

  7. Subject Specific Directories • Envirolink: http://www.envirolink.org • Officer.com:http://www.officer.com/ • Landings:http://www.landings.com • Finding subject-specific directories

  8. Machine Compiled • Robot / Spider • Large database • “Full-text” search

  9. Machine Compiled Indexes • Google • Yahoo • Differences: • Relevancy algorithm used • How deeply they index the site

  10. Subject / Content Specific Indexes(concealed weapons) • Legal Info – LawCrawler • Government documents – USGov • Scholarly articles – Google Scholar • Blogs - Technorati • Images – Google Image • Audio - FindSounds

  11. Searching on the Web X

  12. Foundation of Searching: Boolean Logic

  13. Boolean Connectors • AND • OR • NOT • Create relationships between words, allows you broaden / narrow results

  14. Search Switch – hyper-searching Search Switching Between Web Search Engines • TurboScout • Intelways • Zuula • Trovando

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