Comm Media

Pandia Search Engine Tutorial

If you want:
specialised discussion forums
look for e-mail addresses
narrow down blog search

Web Search Services: directories vs. engines
directories: hierarchical databases with references to hand-picked websites.
- Directories are very useful when you have no more than a general notion of what you are looking for.
- Yahoo is #1 but on their special page.
search engines: robots that read the webpages and put the text into a large database/index that you may access
- Used when you know exactly what you are looking for.
- Cover more of the web than directories.
- Google Yahoo! Search MSN Search Ask
metasearch engines extract hits from both search engines and directories.
- Search.com Metacrawler Pandia Metasearch

Boolean searching:
AND +
AND NOT -
OR
"using quotes"
NEAR
Thomas Alva Edison --> Thomas NEAR Edison
dogs near/3 cats --> how far apart the words can be from each other
parentheses:
pan pizza" AND (pepperoni OR ham) AND olives
vs.
("pan pizza" AND pepperoni) OR (ham AND olives)

Field searching:
narrowing down your search by searching for specific text in a specific place.
Title: bar on top of window browser
URL
Domains: commercial (.com), US educational (.edu), US government (.gov), or US military (.mil)

Error messages:
If you get the message "Document not found" then the website exists but that specific page doesn't
If the server does not have a DNS entry, the page does not exist

Addresses on the Internet:
World Wide Web
http://www.pandia.com/index.html (points to a
web-page coded in hypertext mark-up language
or HTML)
Files
ftp://domain.com/file.zip (points to a file on an
Internet server)
Newsgroups
news:alt.domain-names.disputes (points to a
newsgroup on the Usenet)
E-mail
firstname.lastname@domain.com (points to an
email-address)
Gopher
gopher://home.eunet.no:70/00/1/readgop
(points to a gopher-file - an old fashioned
standard for distributing information on the
Internet)

Menu based search:
- All these words, meaning that the search engine is to fetch pages that have all these words on them (equals Boolean AND or +)
- Any words or One of these words, meaning that the search engine is to fetch pages that have at least one of these words, but not necessarily all, on them (equals Boolean OR)
- This exact phrase, meaning that the search engine is to find pages that include these words in this particular order. When using Boolean searching or search engine math you would enclose the words in double quotation marks (“-“)

posted by maggie @ 8:13 AM