1. Introduction: Internet is a huge collection of
information so it needs the search query to be specific; otherwise, it will
retrieve some irrelevant results. Searching means finding or locating
information through some search engines, directories, databases, etc. The search
over Internet is interactive, provides post co-ordinate search facilities and
produces more results at a higher speed at a reduced cost.
One
can search for most of the information over web by using the keyword that best
describes his/her interest in any general purpose search engine like Google. By
this, one can also locate a discussion group / forum / social network that
match his/her interest. Before asking anyone for help, it is advisable to make
it mandatory to search and spend some time over the web. It will help one to
locate the information quickly, assist him/her and build his/her confidence.
2. Structure of Search Tools: Most search tools have a similar
structure. Generally, all searching tools provide you an option in the form of
search box to conduct a search. They may include in some form-
a) Form: A form to enter the keywords or queries.
b) Initiation of Search: A button which when click will
begin the search.
c) Advance Search: Link to help pages regarding how
to make an advance search, special features and others, and
d) Subject Categories: The option to browse the
resources indexed by the search engine.
3. Search Strategies: To arrive at appropriate target,
a user of a database or search engine should know about the search strategies
that need to be followed. In the following paragraphs some such steps are
listed out.
a) Step 1: Framing the Need by Sentence: Before making a
search it is important to frame your need by appropriate sentences. For
example: “Digital libraries of India”.
b) Step 2: Identifying Keywords: Find out the
keywords or main concepts in the statement. In the above example the keywords
will be <digital library> <India>.
c) Step 3: Identifying Synonyms and Variant Word Forms: Find out the synonyms / alternate spellings, and variant word forms of
each keyword. In the above example the synonyms of <digital library> will
be <Virtual Library>, <Library without wall>, and <Institutional
Repository> and the synonyms of <India> would be <Bharat>.
d) Step 4: Selecting Appropriate Search Technique: At this moment, the user should look into the search techniques that likely
to produce more relevant result for the query in hand. The user can also
combine synonyms, keywords and variant word forms with Boolean operators or can
choose from any of the other search technique available to him/her.
e) Step 5: Checking Spelling: Search engines return websites
with words that match the query word(s). So at the last, it is better to check
all the spellings before putting the query in the Search Engine.
4. Basic Points in Using the Search Engine: Kindly note the
following basic points in using the search engines.
a)
CaSe DOES not MaTTer: Most search engines do not
recognize the differences in lower case or upper case or sentence case and
treat everything equally i.e. A search for <indian capital> is the same
as a search for <Indian Capital> in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
b) Singular and Plural are Different: Most
search engines interpret singular keywords as singular and plural as plural. If
you want plural forms only, make your keywords plural, otherwise put the
singular version.
c) Variation in Wild Card: Wild card is represented by * or
sometimes by a “?” mark in some search engines, while searching in search
engines, kindly keep a note of it.
d)
Variation in Boolean Logic: In case of Boolean logic some search engine treat
<AND> as <*>, “OR” as “+” (plus) and “NOT” as “-”
(minus). While making a search, kindly link your keywords with the proper
Boolean logic symbol used by the particular search engine.
e)
Punctuation are Ignored: Most punctuation, like !, (),
[], which are not the part of a search operator are ignored when the user
search in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
f)
Spelling Does not Matter Most: Google, Yahoo and Bing's spell
checker automatically uses the most common spelling of a given word, whether or
not you spell it correctly.
g)
Keeping SafeSearch on: SafeSearch should help you to
avoid most of the adult content from appearing in your search results. One can
“On” the safe search by going through Google (https://www.google.com/preferences) and in Bing (http://www.bing.com/account/general) pages. In Yahoo there is no option to turn on the Safe Search for sign
out users. SafeSearch should remain set as long as cookies are enabled on your
computer, although your SafeSearch settings may be reset if you delete your
cookies.
5. Search Techniques in Search Engines: When the user
knows precisely what he/she wants i.e. when user information need is fairly
well defined he/she can use different search techniques like keywords, word
truncation, range search, field level search, Boolean combination, word
adjacency / proximity operator, etc. In
the following paragraphs, different search techniques are discussed that will
be especially helpful in searching in Google. It may also prove to be effective
in Yahoo and Bing. While going through the following paragraphs and making a
search kindly ignore the triangular bracket “<” and “>”. These are only
provided to you so that you can exactly know, what need to be entered in the search
engine search box.
a)
Weather Search: Search for weather to see the weather in your
location or add a city name after weather to find weather in that area.
Example: <weather>, <weather guwahati>.
b)
Finding Definition: Put define in front of any word
to find definition or dictionary meaning for that word. Example: <define
university>.
c)
Doing Calculations: Enter a math equation to see the
answer, along with a calculator. Example: <34*70+20>.
d)
Unit Conversions: Enter any conversion with an
<in> in between. Example: <1 dollar in rupees>, <7 meters in
centimeters>.
e)
Sports: Search for the name of the team to see a schedule, game scores and such
others facts. Example: <Indian Cricket Team>.
f)
Quick Facts: Search for the name of a celebrity, location,
movie, musician, company to see quick information on the right side of the
page. Example: <Bhupen Hazarika>, <guwahati>, <sholay>.
g) Searching Social Media: Put @ in front of a word to
search social media. For example: @badanbarman.
h)
Searching Priced Item: Put $ in front of a number to find priced products in that price. For
example: camera $400.
i) Search Hashtags: Put # in front of a word. For example: #lislinks
j) Boolean (Minus) or (Dash) or (Not) Search:
Minus or dash tells the search
engine to retrieve web pages containing one keyword but not the other. One can
use – (minus) when he/she have a keyword that has multiple meanings. Example: <university -gauhati
university>. This example
instructs the search engine to return web pages about university but not web
pages from Gauhati University. One has to put a minus sign just before words
they don’t want.
k)
Phrase Search: When a user is
quite aware of all the words that occur in the same sequence in the relevant
digital document, then he/she can use phrase (or proximity) search techniques.
In such cases the search terms down the search results considerably. Phrase
searching is a powerful search technique for significantly narrowing your
search results, and it should be used as often as possible. Surrounding a group
of words with double quotes tells the search engine to only retrieve documents
in which those words appear side-by-side. Example: <“Library and Information
Science Links”>, <“Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University”>
l) Searching With Range: Put 2 periods (..) between the
numbers and add a unit of measure to distribute your search query within the
range like dates, prices, and measurements. Example: <laptop
$20000..$25000>.
m)
Boolean OR Search: Linking search
terms with OR (in all caps) (+) tells the Google search engine to retrieve web
pages containing ANY of the keywords. When OR is used, the search engine
returns pages with a single keyword, several keywords, and all keywords. So, OR
expand the search results. Example: <Librarian
OR Library>.
n) Website Search: The website search is especially
used when one need to find something in a large site that does not have an
internal search engine (if the site has an internal search engine then for the
best result you should use it). With the site search technique, you can search
all the pages at a website for keywords or phrases of interest. Example: <site:lislinks.com Badan Barman>
or <site:.in Badan Barman>. This search technique is supported by Google,
Yahoo and Bing.
A slightly different
search technique for host like <"host:" lislinks.com PhD> can
also be used to restrict the search to the lislinks.com hosting account.
o)
Search for Related Pages that are Similar to a URL: To find sites that are similar to
a URL you already know, use the <related:> operator. Example: <related:netugc.com>.
If you able to find a particular document useful, you can use the related
operator to locate such other document over the web.
p) Searching Cached Pages: Google crawls the web and takes
snapshots of each page as a backup in case the current page is not available.
These pages then become part of Google’s “cache.” If you are seeing a cached
page it means, you’ll seeing the previous version of the site that was stored
in the server of Google. One can use the cache search feature when the active
website is not available. The cached copy can be especially helpful if the
site's server is down or the web page is no longer available. Example:
<cache:lislinks.com>.
q) Title Search: In the title search, the search
engine will receive an instruction to return web pages where a particular
keywords or phrase appears in the title of the document. Searching effectiveness increases as one combine field searches
with phrase searches and/or Boolean logic. For example, if one wanted to find
information about “Five Laws of Library Science” written by Dr. S R
Ranganathan, one could try for example: <title:“Five
Laws of Library Science”> in Yahoo and Bing and <"title:"
"five laws of library science"> in Google. Here in this case, the
search engine will receive an instruction to return web pages where the phrase
“Five Laws of Library Science” appears in the title. Please note that, there should not be any space between the colon
(:) and the keyword.
r)
Keyword Search: In this
technique, the document available in the WWW is generally searched by using
keywords that may appear in the document. Use of preposition, articles and such
other words are avoided in this type of search. This search technique is most
generally used over the web. Results from this method are often mixed and you
may have to go through many results to find the site most useful to you. For
keyword based search, the search strategy may include identifying keywords by
breaking down the topic into key concepts. Example: <gauhati university>.
s) Boolean AND Search: Linking two or three keywords
with Boolean AND (*) tells the search engine to retrieve the web page
containing all the keywords. So, AND considerably limit the search results.
Example: <OCLC AND Classify>.
t) Wild Card / Truncation / fill
in the blank Search: When a user is aware of only some
of the letters that are contained in the keywords/phrase then he / she can use
wild card search technique to retrieve all the documents containing the words
which again contain the particular letters stated by the user. In wild card
search techniques the known letters are followed by an asterisk “*” or “?” for
the unknown letters or words. The asterisk mark may be given in the left, right
or in both sides of the known letters as the case or need may be. Use an
asterisk (*) within a query as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms.
Use with quotation marks to find variations of that exact phrase or to remember
words in the middle of a phrase. Example: <a * saved is a * earned>,
<Catalog*>.
u) Plan a train or bus trip: One can find the fastest route via public
transit from one location to another by using “from”, “to” and “by” Search.
When you search, you’ll find all sorts of information about public transit,
which may include departure and arrival time, travel time to your destination,
cost to get from one station to another, transfer time and so on. Example:
<guwahati to dibrugarh>, <from guwahati to dibrugarh>, <guwahati
to dibrugarh by road>.
v) Complex Search: A combination of the some of the
popular search techniques can be used to retrieve more relevant results.
Example: <“Classified Catalogue Code” AND “S. R. Ranganathan”>. Here, the
phrase searching is combined with Boolean operator. The expression <Library
AND (Acquisition OR Classification), will search for results matching the
document of Library acquisition or classification.
w)
Search for pages that link to a URL: Use the
<link:> search operator when you want to know what websites are linked to
a particular site of interest. Example:
<link:lislinks.com>. Researchers use link searches for conducting
backward citations. For example, if you have a webpage and you are wondering if
anyone has put a link to your page or referred to your webpage on their
website, you can use the link search. Presently, this search technique is
abandoned by Google.
x) Advanced Search: For certain complex searches,
you might want more control over the results that you see, in such cases try
the Advanced Search (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) page of Google. You can also use search operators to generate many of
these advanced searches right from the regular Google search box.
6. Searching in Different Platforms: Some search
techniques that are specific to some platforms are listed below-
a) General Purpose Search Engine:
A search engine is a program or information retrieval system designed to
help one in retrieving a list of references or information, meeting a specific
criterion from its own databases that are stored on a computer. Almost all the general purpose search engine
supports the Boolean logic in some forms.
i) Google (http://www.google.com)
Search Engine: Google has the largest database at 1.5 billion pages and is very adept at
returning relevant results. Google uses mathematical formulas to rank a web
page based on the number of “important” pages that link to it. Almost all the
search techniques discussed above can be used with Google.
b) Natural Language Search
Engine: Some search engine uses natural language search queries that means the user
is free to use natural language query to retrieve the relevant result. The
system will automatically ignore the unnecessary words. This is true in Ask.com
(http://www.ask.com). Example:
<Who is the Prime Minister of India>, to retrieve the name of the Prime
Minister of India or to retrieve thousands of pages not containing the word
“Who”.
c) Meta Search Engine: The content of search engines, indexes and databases generally vary. So,
if the same search query is typed into several search engines then it is likely
to produce different results. Because of this in searching a topic a user often
wants to see results from various sources. One way to compare the results of
several search engines is to type and retype a query into individual search
engines one at a time. However, this can be very time consuming. A Meta
searcher helps to make this task more efficient by providing a central location
where the query is typed in once and the result can be obtained from multiple
search engines. Example: Sputtr (http://www.sputtr.com/), etc.
d) Wiki Search Engine: A wiki is a type of
editable website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change
most content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for
registration by using relatively easy to use wiki
syntax. The wikis are excellent source for the
research scholars as they provide contents under creative commons license that
can be used by research without asking for the authors for permission. Example:
Wiki.com (https://www.wiki.com).
e) Blog Search Engine: Blog is a web based website where
articles posted will automatically be arranged in reverse chronological fashion
or in a chronological fashion. Blog increasingly considered as a substitute of
the mainstream media for news services, consultants, etc. In recent times, a
part of the literature search relies on internet and for a comprehensive list
of resources over internet; the search should extend to blog also, as it
contains the latest, up to the minute information on a given topic. The blog
search engines have the facilities to retrieve result from specific part of the
world or from a specific time frame. Example: Blogspot Blog Search
(https://www.searchblogspot.com)
f) Image Search Engine: An image search engine used features from an image like name, size, aspect
(tall, square, wide, panoramic), colour (black & white, transparent, blue,
etc), type of image (face, photo, clip art, drawing, animation, etc.) to search
for and identify similar images. Example: Google Images (http://images.google.co.in).
g) Video Search Engine: A video search engine is a
web-based search engine which crawl the web for video content and provide an
interface for the users to search the videos by entering any of the features
available in the video like title, language, duration of the video, quality,
publishing time and so on. Example: YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), Vimeo
(https://vimeo.com), etc.
h) Database Searching: Searching the directory or database is entirely a new experience. One can
search the directory or databases by the specific entry point, which the
particular directory or database is using to search its records. In the
database searching, one can also save his/her result in accordance to his/her
requirement. Example: ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com).
i) Institutional Repository Searching: Institutional
Repository can be defined as the concept of capturing, managing and
disseminating all the scholarly digital assets of an institute. Institutional
Repositories are excellent source for finding out articles, dissertation,
thesis, etc. The Institutional Repositories provide both searching and browsing
options. The browsing options can be title, author, department or community and
so on. Example: Shodhganga (http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in), etc.
j) E-book Search Engine: The E-book Search Engine search
the web for the free ebooks for the user to download, read and enjoy. The
E-book search engine can be searched by entering the title of the book,
chapter, and text from the document, author/editor, publisher, etc. Example: JustFreeBooks
(http://www.justfreebooks.info), etc.
k) E-journal Search Engine: The E-journal search engine
search for the journal or the article published in journal. The articles can be
searched by entering the title of the journal, title of the article, text from
the article, ISSN of the journal, author and publisher and so on. Example: DOAJ
(http://www.doaj.org), JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org), etc.
7. Conclusion: Most of the search engine or
databases often return thousands of results. So, to use search engines /
databases effectively, it is essential to apply techniques that narrow results
and push the most relevant pages to the top of the results list. Knowledge of
search strategies boost search engine / database performance. Any user by
spending a few minutes clarifying his / her need, can increase the chances of
finding relevant information over internet and without proper search strategies
or techniques, finding what you need will be difficult task
A web page is
composed of a number of fields, such as host, title, site, etc. In case of
field search techniques the webpages are searched by using the words contained
in its field. Field searching is one of the most effective techniques for
narrowing results and getting the most relevant websites listed at the top of
the result page.
The more care
and thought you put into your search strategy, the more relevant your search
results will be. A well designed search strategy will save your time in the
long run, allow you to search for information in many different places, and
help you to find a larger amount of relevant information. Different strategies
work better for different people and so there is no need to follow every step
listed above. One can try himself/herself a few different techniques to see
what works best for him/her.
How to Cite this
Article?
APA Citation, 7th Ed.: Barman, B. (2020). A comprehensive book on Library and Information Science. New
Publications.
Chicago 16th Ed.: Barman, Badan. A Comprehensive Book on Library and Information Science. Guwahati:
New Publications, 2020.
MLA Citation 8th Ed: Barman, Badan. A Comprehensive Book on Library and Information Science. New
Publications, 2020.

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