I have difficulty dealing with search engines. They come up with far too many results for my searches (A14).
The first option to search the Internet more efficiently is through a search engine. The most popular search engines at the moment are Google, Yahoo, Altavista and MSN. Search engines are not neutral tools. They select information and it is therefore as important to know how they work as it is to know what the quality of the journal is that you read. A good researcher controls the quality of sources used, and the same applies to the use of search engines.
1. General construct of a search engine
A search engine generally consists of three parts (Google online, 2004; Startpagina online, 2004):
• The spider - the spider is the program that actually searches through the Internet, downloads the pages it finds, and follows the links on the pages.
• The database - the websites that are found, are stored in the database, the Google-index. In this index, pages are stored alphabetically, by search term.
• The user-interface - the user-interface, which is the actual search engine you find on google.com then searches through this database, in order to find websites relevant to your search terms.
2. Steps in search process
When using search engines, it is essential that you know what you are looking for on the Internet. The more specific your search, the bigger the chance is that the search engine will provide you with interesting links for your research. In general, a number of steps can be identified, when using a search engine (Google online, 2004):
• Know what you want to find. If you have a clear idea of your problem it is much easier to find useful search terms.
• Do the right search. This means you have to use appropriate keywords. These keywords should be as specific as possible. For example, when you want to find something about Nike, use -Nike- as search term, not -a sports brand-.
• Narrow down your search. By using more than one keyword, you can narrow down the amount of relevant results. So use -Nike shoes- if you want to find information about the shoes made by Nike. You can also narrow down your search by excluding certain words. This can be done by using Boolean logic. If you want to find something about Nike shoes, but not for indoor, you could try –Nike shoes NOT indoor- (the Boolean AND is used automatically by Google). This can also be done by using the Advanced Search function. The third important way of narrowing down your search is by the use of quotation marks. If you search on -“George W Bush”- it will only give results in which the complete sentence appears. Make use of these search abbreviations (AND/OR/BUT/NOT). The search abbreviations could make your search easier. Make them part of your standard operating procedures.
3. Search results
You can get an enormous amount of hits when your search query is not specific enough. To find the results that are valuable for you, it is important to know how the list is ranked. Google’s website reports that it ranks the hits by relevance and importance. More than hundred different factors determine a website’s relevance in the Google search engine. Besides this relevance issue, Google takes the importance of the website into account. The number of links to a certain website determines the importance within Google’s search engine, and by which sites link to a certain website. So, the list of search results is compiled of websites that are relevant to your search terms, in order of importance. Be aware of a possible bias in the search results, although Google’s website reports that they do not sell placement in results. It is proven that the listing of results can be influenced to a considerable extent. Users in the Netherlands who typed in “raar kapsel” (weird hairdo) were for instance directed to the website of Prime Minister Balkenende – who was also know as the Dutch “Harry Potter”. Users in China will not find a large number of items, because Google has applied a form of self-censorship in order to be accepted by the Chinese authorities.
So the result that has the most value for you is not automatically the first result you get (or to put it differently: that is selected for you by Google). For example, it is possible that the best result is on the eleventh page. What you can do about this is to narrow down your search again by using the function of ‘searching within the results’. This function allows you to add a new search term to exclude pages which are not relevant anymore. The greater the number of times you refine your search, the more satisfying the result should be in the end.
4. Critical use of search engines
Because everybody can publish work on the Internet, the issue of reliability becomes more important. Many websites publish work that is not checked or even fake. In general, people will not necessarily reveal sources on their website. The same is true for the use of search engines. Their policies are not always as transparent as you would wish. Take the following things into account when using a search engine: By searching for more than one source, the probability that something you find is true becomes much more likely.
• Be aware that many links have a commercial objective. Most of the times the commercial and free hits are separated.
• Be aware that people could make their website foolproof.
• Be aware of the ‘Google principle’, website with a large number of cross-links will be put higher on the list; this can be manipulated which implies that the top ranked hits might in fact not be the most relevant for your search (for instance paid portals seem to move up more than non-paid portals). Alternative search engines exist were the ranking of websites is supervised by real people.
• The two line description under the Google hit, might not be representative for its contents (the Google search engines draws these lines directly from the original website, but does not have a clue of its contents). Alternative search engines are available that show a snapshot of the whole website.
• The Google search engine has particularly problems with giving you relevant hits in case of multi-interpretable words. Other search engines (like Quintura.com or KartOO.com) provide alternatives by presenting so called Tagclouds or diagrams that show a range of concepts related to your search word, after which you can further specify your search.
Some search engines on the Internet start to offer certain options and claim to be meta-search engines, i.e. searching into different search engines at the same time (for example mamma.com). In this way, better and better mechanisms are becoming available to make finding information on the Internet easier. In this way, the Internet has become an essential information gathering source in the orientation phases of a research process. Always make use of more than one search engine, because every search engine gives another output to your search request.
Always make use of more than one search engine, because every search engine gives another output to your search request.
