2. What is SEARCH ENGINES?
A search engine is a program that finds web sites and web pages.
Below are examples of popular search engines.
google.com
yahoo.com
askkids.com
metacrawler.com
about.com
Using a search engine, you can easily find the web pages you need.
Simply enter a word or a phrase, called search text or keywords, in the
search engine’s box.
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3. Two Categories of Search Engines
1. DIRECTORIES
such as about.com and
2. INDEXES
yahoo, are good
identifying general
information.
The results of your
search will be a list of
web sites related to
your search term.
like altavista and
google, find individual
pages of a web site that
match your keyword.
They search all the
contents of a web
site, analyzing millions of
web pages and indexing
all of the words.
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4. ADVANCED WEB SEARCHING
CAPITALIZATION – most search engines are NOT
case sensitive.
PHRASE SEARCHING – when using a phrase as
keyword, enclose the words in quotation marks (“”) so
that the search engine will return only documents
containing the exact phrase.
ASTERISKS – if you are looking for information on
astronomy, you could use it as your keyword.
--use a root part of word & abbreviate it with an
asterisk….ex. Astro*
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5. ADVANCED WEB SEARCHING
BOOLEAN OPERATORS – the English
mathematician George Boole developed a
way that has become the basis for computer
searches. Boole used words called operators
to determine whether a statement is true or
false.
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6. Most common operators
AND
OR
NOT
printer AND
color
printer OR
color
printer NOT
color
Printer and color
The search
engine looks only
for pages that
include both
terms and
ignores pages
that include only
one of them.
The search
engine looks for
pages that
include either or
both of the
terms.
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The search engine
looks for pages that
include the term
printer but do not
include the term
color. The search
engine ignores any
pages that include
both terms.
7. ADVANCED WEB SEARCHING
+REQUIRE and -EXCLUDE – some engines
offer a variation of the Boolean operators AND
and NOT.
A + symbol preceding a keyword (with no
space between) requires that the word be
present in documents.
A – symbol preceding a keyword ensures that
the word is not present in returned documents.
Example: +computer+virus
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