Internet search techniques

1. Internet Search Techniques
Hup university
28-02-2018
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2. Truncation and wild card symbols
• widen your search and ensure that you don't
miss relevant records
• Most databases are not intelligent - they just
search for exactly what you type in.
• Truncation and wild card symbols enable you
to overcome this limitation.
• These symbols can be substituted for letters to
retrieve variant spellings and word endings.
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3. • a wild card symbol replaces a single letter -
useful to retrieve alternative spellings and simple
plurals
example wom?n will find woman or women
• a truncation symbol retrieves any number of
letters - useful to find different word endings
based on the root of a word
eg africa* will find africa, african, africans,
africaans
eg agricultur* will find agriculture, agricultural,
agriculturalist
Truncation and wild card symbols
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4. Search Operators – AND
• combine your search words and include
synonyms
• Boolean operators, search operators allow you to
include multiple words and concepts in your
searches.
• AND retrieves records containing both words.
• contains records with both women and africa in
the text.+ It narrows your search.+ Some
databases automatically connect keywords
with and.
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5. • OR retrieves records containing either word.
• contains records with women, or gender, or
both words in the text.+ It broadens your
search.+ You can use this to include synonyms
in your search.
Search Operators – OR
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6. • NOT retrieves your first word but excludes the
second.
• indicates that only records containing just
Africa will be retrieved (not those with both
Africa and Asia)
• Beware! By using this operator you might
exclude relevant results because you will lose
those records which include both words.
Search Operators – NOT
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7. Phrase Searching
• Phrase searching is a useful technique which can increase the
relevance of your results. Sometimes your search may comprise
common words which, when combined in an AND search, retrieve
too many irrelevant records.
• Databases use different techniques to specify phrase searching -
check the online help. Some web search engines and databases
allow you to specify a phrase using inverted commas.
eg "agricultural development"
eg "foot and mouth"
• Hint! Some databases automatically perform a phrase search if you
do not use any search operators eg agriculture africa is not a phrase
used in English so you may not find any items on the subject.
Use AND in between your search words to avoid this.
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8. Proximity Searching
• make a search more specific and exclude irrelevant
records
• Some databases use 'proximity operators'. These enable
you to specify how near one word must be to another and,
in some cases, in what order. This makes a search more
specific and excludes irrelevant records. Performing a
proximity search will only retrieve the two words in the
same sentence, and so exclude those irrelevant records.
• Databases which have this facility vary considerably in their
methods
eg: Web of Science - women same africa - retrieves records
where the two words appear in the same sentence.
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