-Welcome to STORY 1001!

Searching Hints & Tips

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How do Search Engines Actually Work?
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Search engines use software to spider the Web and create their databases. These are also sometimes called robots, web crawlers, or worms. Web pages are retrieved and indexed by these search engines.
When you enter a query at a search engine, your input is checked against the search engine's keyword indices. The best matches are then returned to you as matches.

No1: No search engine covers very much of the vast material available on the Internet! Imagine millions and millions of documents & files of various kinds.

Ingen sökmotor täcker särskilt mycket av det otroligt omfattande materialet som finns på Internet! Tänk dig att det finns miljontals och åter miljontals dokument & filer av olika slag.

Vissa sökmotorer är bra till vissa saker, andra till annat. Om du vet att materialet du söker är skrivet och publicerat (digitalt) i Sverige, ja, då kan du ju söka här hemma med hjälp av en svensk sökmotor/sökmotorversion som www.yahoo.se www.altavista.se eller www.google.se.

Söker du material som du tror finns utomlands och/eller är publicerat på ett annat språk än svenska, ja, då skall du naturligtvis söka med ett annat språk än svenska och du skall definitivt inte besvära dig med att använda svenska sökmotorer/sökmotorversioner.
Se språkval samt ev. landskod, URL:en slutar med .se, mm mm!
Flera kriterier finns som hjälper dig fastställa en sidas hemvist.

Kom också ihåg att olika motorer fungerar mer eller mindre bra med hjälp av varierad sökteknik som att använda citattecken/citationstecken (" "), plustecken ( + + ), minustecken (- -) eller asterisk/"stjärna" ( * ). "Stjärnan" i dagligt tal, egentligen benämnd 'asterisk' är ju något av en joker i leken och kan med framgång ibland användas då man är osäker på exakt stavning eller variant av ord, eller exakt frasinnehåll.

" " citattecken använder du när du skall ha tag på ett exakt uttryck eller ett givet namn där sökobjektet/sökmålet innehåller flera ord. Här är oftast citattecken ett bra och väl fungerande grepp.
I'd like to find me a "yacht of more than 30 feet"

* * asterisk/"stjärna" klan* fångar kanske både 'klant', 'klang' & 'Klangehamn' så använd asterisk med förstånd & skärpa

+ + plustecken +saltgurka +falukorv fångar med automatik de sidor som innehåller exakt orden 'saltgurka' & 'falukorv' och i den formen

- - minustecken -kalle +Sigrid eliminerar automatiskt sidorna där det står om järngänget 'Sigrid' & 'Kalle' & 'Halta Lotta' och gallrar så att säga fram med finess & bravur endast de intressanta sidorna som du vill ha där endast Sigrid beskrivs eller omtalas.

...och, som sagt var, eftersom ingen sökmotor eller sökteknik fungerar över hela fältet så är det viktigt att känna till några av förutsättningarna och de här ovan nämnda klarar man sig icke utan. Resten är fotarbete, fotarbete och tid & tålamod i kombination med fantasi & envishet. Naturligtvis underlättar ett visst språkligt intresse för detaljer.

SEARCH - For those not used to search and search functions within the computing environment, searching on the Internet & searching in a database sometimes need an x-tra amount of consideration & thought before getting started.
Learn about 'wildcards' & 'wildcard characters' before you find yourself in a very time-consuming situation, confused, out of time, lagging behind, not knowing anything or little at the most, sometimes with a feeling or sense of realization that there is really no information to be found.

'Wild card' is a method permitting an operating system to perform utility functions on multiple files with related names without the user or programmer having to specify each file by its full & unique name. That's why you sometimes might end up finding "Donna", "Dona", "Donald" and "Don" when you've searched for "Don".

Remember also to get your 'slash' right (/)...When you're in system folders and directories you want a (your) slash tilted to the left ( \ ) whereas when you're on the Internet or on your local Intranet you want to use "the right one" (/).

Quite frequently colleagues turn to me complaining about the lack of information. Now there's usually never a single digit right in that assumption.

Good searching needs common sense, creativity, technique and an on-line computer. That's about it!

Technique can be acquired by reading thoroughly through the instructions found at major search sites.

Also, there's usually very good information to be found in your own Web Browser under Help.

MS Internet Explorer Help has this to say: "As you search for items on the Internet, you may want to customize the way you search. You can choose which search categories are available and which search providers to use for your searches."

..... and....

"You can find information on the Web in a variety of ways:

Click the Search button on the toolbar to gain access to a number of search providers. Type a word or phrase in the Search box.

Type go, find, or ? followed by a word or phrase in the Address bar. Internet Explorer starts a search using its predetermined search provider.

After you go to a Web page, you can search for specific text on that page by clicking the Edit menu, and then clicking Find (on this page)."

NOTE If you search for Peggy de la Mesilla you have to type "Peggy de la Mesilla" ( "..." )or you'll end up having millions of 'Peggy'.

Also, of course, it is important to become aware of the importance of "the plus" (+). If you want to find something consisting of two words where the word order doesn't matter you type a plus (+) before each word (+bilar +Chevrolet). If you want pages or websites containing information in Swedish about Chevrolet cars, this is it. If the word order is significant (important) you use a quotation mark at each end (before the first word and after the second word). This way you make sure you end up finding pages where these words are found exactly the way you wanted them. Type mainly using small letters unless otherwise required by circumstances, because 'peanut' will find 'Peanut' but never will Peanut find peanut (groundnut)!

Learn somewhat here about

'wildcards' &

wildcard

characters...

NOW!

Here are some wildcard characters & their meanings

? any single character in this position

* any number of characters in this position

# a single number in this position

[] find these characters

[!] don't find these characters [!character here]

If you make a habit of using these characters in your search activities you can rest assured regarding utilizing your limited time and making the best of it.

Example
If you were to search for h?ll you would find
hall, hell, hill, hull, håll, häll, höll but you wouldn't find 'hålla', 'hälla' etc. which would require the following search text: h?ll?

Similarly you would find 'the', 'true', 'tongue' but not 'tea' if you were to search for t*e

LYCOS

-Please be aware of the fact that some sites, pages & databases do not accept or even work with characters other than letters and numbers! This, among other things, is what makes it so darn important to be creative and search in various ways and manners using different techniques as part of your regular search behaviour.

Don't forget the language you're using, and remember that sometimes it might prove quite efficient even trying out words & phrases which you actually have to look up first on your own.

Don't depend on one language only when searching!

Make a habit of looking up words you don't understand!

Enter a word or phrase

Read more about searching and search engines:

Best of the Web 1994 -- Navigators http://botw.org/1994/awards/navigators.html

Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. http://www.io.com/~cjburke/clinton/970414.html

Google Search Engine http://google.stanford.edu/

Mauldin, Michael L. Lycos Design Choices in an Internet Search Service, IEEE Expert Interview http://www.computer.org/pubs/expert/1997/trends/x1008/mauldin.htm

The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention http://www.webfirst.com

Search Engine Watch http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

Web Growth Summary: http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html

EXCERPT:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

Computer Science Department,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
sergey@cs.stanford.edu and page@cs.stanford.edu

-"Abstract

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day.

Sergey Brin received his B.S. degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University where he received his M.S. in 1995. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. His research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data.

Lawrence Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan, and received a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in 1995. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University. Some of his research interests include the link structure of the web, human computer interaction, search engines, scalability of information access interfaces, and personal data mining."-