Smart Searching

about search engines
how to find information
how to refine your results
using the data you find
the future of search engines
what its all about

about search engines

a search engine is a tool that helps you find information, (typically on the internet).
search engines find data, index the data to search terms, rank the relevance of the data to the search term and display the results.
different search engines work in different ways.
some use complex programmes and maths to create the data to search term relationships others use human input.
what is a search engine

some of the key search engines…

traditional search technologies Early search engines were simple directories of data to url As the internet grew meta tags, meta data, titles and keywords were used to help search engines identify and keep track of the growing volumes of information in more complex databases. With current levels of data, search engines like Google use ever more complex algorithms to rank the results based on a range of factors including relevance and popularity(from monitoring sites like Alexa or digg like votes as yahoo buzz). There is a trend to make search results more visually rich. Searches like tafiti combine graphic technologies like silverlight to allow results to be stacked and data dragged to a pasteboard. Some search engines like dogpile combine results from several individual search engines like ask,google and yahoo into a single set of results.

With the current volume of data attempts are now being made to improve the quality not quantity of search results. Sites like Clusty, use high quality text clustering and labelling and linguistics to second guess what users are really looking for. Recognising the difference between “a drive by killing” and “making a killing”. Sites like Mahalo, a “human search engine” are concentrating on having real people write result pages with meaningful explanations examples, tips and links. Sites like Wikipedia provide a single source for user generated information. Wikia search is a sort of hybrid search engine with social content. True knowledge is an attempt to create semantic search engine that will answer real questions, like when was Elvis born or what age is Madona newer search technologies

“ The best search engine is the one that gives you the information that best meets your needs, with the least work required on your part”.
This will vary depending on
:
what information you are looking for.
what information is available
how you prefer to search
how good you are at manipulation data
which is the best search engine?

the problem with search engines

you can’t find enough information.
you find too much information.
You don’t know how reliable the information you found is.
3 common problems

can’t find the information you want?

Try a different search term
Think laterally
Try using a wild card (*) or synonym (~)
example if your not sure of a spelling replacing a letter with a * this will find all words with any letter where you have placed the *
Try a different search engine
Try searching within specific sites
Start from something you know
look up something similar and see what the search terms are for that and if anything links to what your looking for..
can’t find enough results?

can’t seeing the wood for the trees?

found too much data?
refine how your looking (which engine)
refine what your looking for (images, text)
refine your search terms
use booleans (search math)
refine where your looking (in url, in title)

target your search

Think about what are you looking for and which sort of search engine may be best suited to finding it.
Would a wide ranging algorithm based search like Google, a clustered search like clusty, a human search like mahalo or a semantic search like ask wiki work best.
Do you want to limit results to uk based sites or all sites..
use the right search engine

<welcome to the revolution!> pick the right target

Is there another word or phrase that means the same or could be more specific?
Example: nano and nanotechnology
Use “” to find a specific phrase.
Example:. shoe pastry will return articles referring to shoe pastry and articles referring to either shoes or pastries. “shoe pastry” will only return articles relating specifically to shoe pastry.
use the right search terms

improve your accuracy

Booleans statements or search maths allow you to search using multiple search terms at the same time to widen or narrow your search.
Use AND, OR (+) and NOT(-)
Example:You might want to find a hotel in paris texas.
Use AND or OR (+) to expand the search to look for all terms
paris AND texas AND hotel ( paris + texas + hotel)
Use NOT (-) to reduce the search to remove some terms
paris AND texas AND hotel NOT france NOT hilton
( paris + texas + hotel -france -hilton)
use booleans

Use SITE: to limit your search to specific websites Example: Site:co.uk travel would only find travel sites with.co.uk urls. Site:microsoft.co.uk sharepoint Use inURL: to limit it to site with the term in the url. Example: inURL:baltic would find only sites with baltic in the actual url Use filetype:<type> to limit it to site with the term in the url. Example: filetype:pdf baltic would find only pdf documents refering to baltic. specify operands

Most search engine offer advanced search options.
Most advanced searches allow you to specify specific types of data and specific date ranges.
Most allow you to build Boolean searches.
use advanced searches

cutting through the to the results

Where has the information come from?
Did the source create the data themselves or did they find it somewhere else?
Is the producer a credible source?
How impartial is the source?
Does other information agree with other data you have found?
is the data you found reliable?

©®™ Most information on the internet will be protected by copyright, intellectual copyright or trademark. Generally its Ok to use for personal research but should not be reused without permission.. can you reuse the data you find? Creative commons is a really good way to allow people to see just what they can do with your information, and for you to be sure what you can do with theirs.

staying on target

Once you have found the information ensure that you stay up to date by signing up to alerts to up date you when new information is found.
Once you have discovered data that you find useful, use social bookmarking sites to tag and share that data, so that you can easily find it again.
Use social bookmarking sites to see what other people that have bookmarked the same data are currently looking at.
staying up to date

“ Search many engines collect and use your data.
The amount of data collected and the things this data is used for varies from site to site”
If you have a Google account and the Google tool bar, every search you conduct and each site you visit is recorded can viewed when you log into your account along with stats and trend data.
Yahoo now provide an ap called eraser that that will hide your personal data from their data collection
Search data may also be stored locally on your hard drive until manually cleaned.
privacy

“ While some strive to publish information publically on the internet others strive to keep it hidden, or to limit those they choose to share it with”.
Most search engines support the ability to mark pages with code to keep it out of search engines.
There are many on-line communities and private networks that only allow their content to be search by registered members.
deep web

More useful sources of information…

the future of searching…

current web trends…
56 billion static pages publically available.
An additional 6 billion pages not publically available on private networks.
200+ billion database - driven pages available as dynamic database reports (invisible to search engines).
Google.com indexed 9.75 billion pages
Google accounts for over 50% of all searches in the USA.

Advanced Clustering
Search engines already sort data by file type, image, news, web etc they will arrange result into cluster groups by context. For example software may be clustered into groups by platform, function, cost etc
Predictive searching
Search engines will match your search patterns to guess what you may want to search for next, based on what other people have searched for next.
Geo aware searching
With increased numbers of mobile devices including gps / gprs technology, mobile searches will be increasingly geo aware, knowing where you are and returning search results that are close by.
what are we likely to see in the future...

Personalised searching
Your search engine will learn your tastes, humour and preferred way of receiving information and show you only products, images or jobs that it thinks you’ll like in the way that you like to see them.
Semantic searching
You will be able to ask, real questions like who designed this, or when was he born.and get short simle answers.
International searching
Site data will be translated into a common language and tagged with Semantic tags so that when you search the web you will get all the results not just those writen in the language you happen to speak.
what are we likely to see in the future...

<contributions> Most of the data in this document was found using search engines, And social bookmarking sites. Much of the content came from online communities and Documents shared using creative commons.. <Produced by> david coxon www.davidcoxon.com

its about finding not searching... targeted searches yield quality results

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Smart Searching

by BALTIC centre for contemporary art, BALTIC, Gateshead on May 07, 2008

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