For Middle school to university students

1. Welcome to
Internet Search Techniques Session
Diploma Programme, 2015
EISHCMC
Mr. Zakir
Teacher-Librarian

2. Internet Search Techniques
How to Search Online Resources

3. Search Engine
A web search engine is designed to search for information on
the World Wide Web. The information may be a specialist in web
pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search
engines also mine data available in databases or open
directories.

4. Keyword Search Engines
You know what you're looking for, and can describe it with some keywords or phrases.
Google (www.google.com)(hybrid)
Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) (hybrid)
Bing (www.bing.com)
WebNocular (www.webnocular.com)
Slikk (www.slikk.com), etc.
Index or Directory based search engines
These search engines arrange data in hierarchies from broad to narrow. Good if you need an
overview of a subject or you're not entirely sure of what you want. For example-
Yahoo Directory (www.yahoo.com)
Open Directory (www.dmoz.org)
Meta/ Multi Search Engines
Meta search engines take the results from all the other search engines results, and combine
them into one large listing. Examples of Meta search engines include:
Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com)
Dogpile (www.dogpile.com)
Forelook (http://www.forelook.com) for Google, Bing, Delicious, Flickr,
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wolfram, etc.
Types of Search Engines

5. Google!
Google: Google is an American multinational corporation which
provides Internet-related products and services, including internet
search, cloud computing, software and advertising technologies. The
company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both
attended Stanford University.
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page
and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford
University in California.

6. How does Google work?
 Google is a full-text search engine, which uses computerized
"spiders" to index millions, sometimes billions, of pages,
allowing for much narrower searches than searchable subject
index, which searches only the titles and descriptions of sites,
and doesn't search individual pages
 Google isn’t case-insensitive. If you search for Three, tHRee,
THREE, or even THREE, you get the same results.
 Singular is different from plural. Searches for apple and apples
turn up different pages.
 The order of words matters. Google considers the first word
most important, the second word next, and so on
 Google ignores most little words, including "I," "where,"
"how," "the," "of," "an," "for," "from," "how," 'it," "in," and "is,“.
Google ignores most punctuation, except apostrophes,
hyphens, and quote marks
 Google returns pages that match your search terms exactly
 Google search word limit is 32

7. How does Google Work? (cont…)
Matt video

8. Google Web Search Basics
1. Basic Boolean Search
 Google's Boolean default is AND, which means that if you enter
query words without modifiers, Google will search for all your query
words. Like- Search Technique= Search AND Technique.
 If you prefer to specify that any one word or phrase is acceptable,
put an OR (in capital letter), lower case or won’t work correctly. For
example: enter Yahoo OR Google.
 A computer programming character | can work like OR (e.g. Yahoo |
Google)
 If you want to search for a particular term along with two or more
other terms, group the other terms within parentheses, like so
“search techniques” (Yahoo OR Google)

9. Google Web Search Basics
2. Phrase Searches
 Enter key words search techniques. Google will find matches
where the keywords appear anywhere on the page.
 If you want Google to find you matches where the keywords
appear together as a phrase, surround them with quotes, like this
“search techniques”
3. Negation
 If you want to specify that a query item must not appear in your
results, prepend a (minus sign or dash): “search techniques” –
Google. This will search the pages that contain “search
techniques”, but not the word Google
 Note that the symbol must appear directly before the word or
phrase that you don't want. If there's space between, as in the
following query, it won't work as expected “search techniques” –
Google
4. Explicit Inclusion
 Google will search for all the keywords and phrases that you
specify, however, there are certain words that Google will ignore
because they are considered too common to be of any use in the
search (e.g. “a”, “the”, “of”, etc.)
 You can force Google to take a stop word into account b

10. Google Web Search Basics
5. Synonyms
 The Google synonym operator, the ~ (tilde) character, pre-pended to
any number of keywords in your query, asks Google to include not
only exact matches, but also what it thinks are synonyms for each of
the keywords. Searching for: ~ape turns up results for monkey,
gorilla, chimpanzee, and others (both singular and plural forms) of
the ape or related family, as if you'd searched for: monkey gorilla
chimpanzee (Synonyms are bolded along with exact keyword
matches on the results page, so they're easy to spot)
6. Number Range
 The number range operator, .. (two periods), looks for results that fall
inside your specified numeric range (e.g. digital camera 3.5
megapixel $800..$1000)
 You can also use the number range syntax with just one number,
making it the minimum or maximum of your query (e.g. digital
camera ..5 megapixel $800..)

11. 7. Simple Searching and Feeling Lucky
 The I'm Feeling Lucky™ button is a thing of beauty. Rather than giving
you a list of search results from which to choose, you're whisked away to
what Google believes is the most relevant page given your search (i.e.,
the first result in the list). Entering Washington post and clicking the
I'm Feeling Lucky button takes you directly to
http://www.washingtonpost.com.
8. Searching Within Your Results
 Help you narrow down your results to find the really relevant pages
within your results pages only.
 Click Search within results link at the bottom of every results page. It
will shows below and you can enter another keyword
Google Web Search Basics

12. 1. Use Rare Words : The more unusual or uncommon the keywords you
use are, the more specific the results will be. Taking a moment to think of a
valid yet uncommon word is a valuable technique. Like- alcohol and Vodka.
2. Most Important Word First: From personal experience with Google, I
have found putting the word that is most important to your search in first,
gets slightly better results.
3. Reverse Questions: Search engines look for pieces of text that match
your query. Web pages are more likely to contain answers than questions -
so search for the answer. Phrase your query how you would expect the
answer to read - the difference appears slight, but it makes a huge
difference. Say- "IRS stands for" rather than "What does IRS stand for?"
"sky is blue because" instead of "Why is the sky blue?"
4. Dead Link Solutions: Try shortening the URL to the next subheading.
Keep doing so until you get to the point that works. Then browse from there
to see if you can track down the file that you want.
Example- If http://www.spock.com/jim/life/not_as_we_know_it.html returns an error,
Try http://www.spock.com/jim/life/ and if you still get an error,
try http://www.spock.com/jim/ and so on down to the root domain
http://www.spock.com
Tips for Searching the Web

13. What Matters In My Search Query?
1
Every word matters.
Try searching for [who], [the who], and [a who]
2
Order matters.
Try searching for [blue sky] and [sky blue]
3
Capitalization does not matter.
Try searching for [barack obama] and [Barack Obama]
4
Punctuation does not matter.
Try searching for [red: delicious! apple?] and [red delicious
apple]
*
There are some exceptions!
Can you think of any? Click here for a few examples.

14. Think Before You Search
What am I
looking for?
How would I
talk about this?
How would
someone else
talk about this?
What keywords could I use in my
search query?
Which of these keywords are
common or general words? Which
would be more specific? Are there
better words I could use?
What kind of
results am I
looking for?
Do I want a definition, a database, a
list, a map, an image, a video, or
something else?
How can I
describe this
better?
What do I want? What am I trying
to find? What am I trying to find
out?

15. Pitfalls
 endless links that
leads to getting lost
 data traffic takes
eternity to download
 too many; too few;
many irrelevant sites
 information overload
Solutions
• stop / try another
search
• try it another time
/site; change ISP
• refine or vary your
search
• search with a more
specific question in
mind
6.1 Tips for Searching the Web

16. Special Syntax to get specific information
 site: allows you to narrow your search by a site or by a top-
level domain
site:edu
 link: returns a list of pages that link to the specified URL.
Enter link:www.google.com and you'll get a list of pages that
link to the Google home page, http://www.google.com (not
anywhere in the google.com domain)
 cached: finds a copy of the page that Google indexed even if
that page is no longer available at its original URL or has
since changed its content completely.
 Similar: To find similar information, website or documents.
 File type: searches the suffixes or filename extensions
"leading economic indicators" filet type:ppt
 define: gives you a page full of definitions of a word from
around the Web
Quiz

17. Advanced Image Search
Advance Image Search

18. What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly
literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines
and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions,
from academic publishers, professional societies, online
repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps
you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Google Scholar and its Features

19. Setting Preferences

20. Setting Preferences (cont…)

21. • Use a query containing WHOIS to identify the owner of a particular website.
• If you see a second company listed as a contact on the WHOIS page, then a
relationship exists between the two companies; you can then do another
search to determine that relationship.
• Example: [whois] finds WHOIS registries you can use. Find the search box for
the registry, and enter [zagat.com]. See that Google is the registrant. Search for
[google zagat], which leads to the information that Google acquired Zagat.
• The US Chamber of Commerce operates the WHOIS search available at
http://www.internic.net/whois.html; alternative WHOIS registries also exist.
• If you don’t know a company's website, you can search for the company’s name
in Google and locate the web address.
There is on parameter to justify the authenticity of websites. However these might
be the part of bona-fide websites links.
.org; .edu; .gov; .mil; .au/ .ca/ .my/ .vn/ .bd etc
Quiz
How to find the authenticity of websites?

22. “Google Can Bring You Back 100,000 Answers,
A Librarian Can Back You The Right One”
-Neil Gaiman

23. Q&A