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November 07, 2003
Second IL Con-Grunt: Search
Mary Ellen Bates gave a great talk on search at Internet Librarian 2003. She offered many more tips, but these were the ones that stood out for me.
- Always use more than one search engine... surprisingly little overlap among search engine indexes, and relevance ranking surfaces different URLs
- Use Alta Vista's world keyboard to insert non Roman characters
- Use AltaVista's "sort by" box to focus results
- Alta Vista is the one search engine that supports "near" --try holistic NEAR veterinarian , then add a sort term and sort
- Use thesauri to find different terms
- Try Google's new "define" feature: e.g. define sheep
- watch for alternative phrasing, e.g. retirement vs.superannuation
- To use Google's synonym feature: ~term
- Be aggressive with "pearl culturing" (also called citation seed growing)--digging through citations in high-confidence documents
- Use tools, not search engines; then use a search engine to find a tool, and then let a tool find the answer
- Search for sources, not just information
- Assume the key information will be buried in the invisible Web
- Use AlltheWeb's URL investigator: excellent background on a Web site
- Use "reverse link" searching as a citation search, eg.: link:www.BatesInfo.com -- works best for very focused sites
- earch full text recall.archive.org
- For old DNS records, See Dialog's Doman Names (file 225) which lists Whowas records
- Poke around the site; use its site search, its search engine; use its site map; pull down all the pull down menus
- Mine Yahoo groups (available as RSS)
- Know the advanced search capabilities of at least three search engines:
truncation, proximity searching, case sensitivity, field searching - Use results clustering where available
- Read Bates' Tip of the Month
Posted by kgs at November 7, 2003 08:58 AM
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Comments
Have no friends not equal to yourself.
Posted by: Foong Chwee Sze at January 26, 2004 05:31 AM