| Search engines are programs that find documents based on specific keywords. Typically a search
engine is capable of searching through millions of electronic documents on the Internet and retrieves results in
relevancy ranked order. |
Some of the most popular search engines |
URLs |
Google |
|
Lycos |
|
Yahoo! |
|
Clusty |
|
Ask Jeeves |
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When conducting a search using a search engine, you should use the search tips you learned in Lesson 1 for
refining a search such as Boolean Operators (and, or and not), truncation
and phrase searching.
Here is a brief comparison showing which of these refining techniques are supported by two of the most popular
search engines. |
| |
Google |
Yahoo! |
| Boolean Operators |
"AND" operator is automatically activated between each word entered (unless you put quotation
marks around them), but "OR" operator can be inserted between search words. |
Not supported by this search engine. |
| Phrase searching |
Using quotation marks around search words to search for a specific phrase is supported |
Using quotation marks around search words to search for a specific phrase is supported |
| Truncation |
Not supported by this search engine. |
Not supported by this search engine. |
| Plus/Minus symbols |
To include a common word such as "the", "where", and "how" in the search,
put a + sign in front it. |
Is supported by this search engine. |
Since Google is one of the best search engines, it is important to point out some
additional features:
- Google Scholar is a new feature that searches through peer-reviewed,
scholarly papers across many disciplines.
|
- Google Book Search is a new feature that searches and makes available the full
text of books. This project is just at its beginning stages.
|
- A search in Google can be limited to specific URL extensions, such as ".gov"
or ".edu" by using the Advanced Search option. This feature is also supported by Yahoo!
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