(www.altavista.com)
is a keyword search engine. Alta Vista searches
through all the text of all the documents it finds. As a
result it could find thousands of documents if you do not
carefully select the keywords. Before you use a search engine
like this you should read and practice the basic
tips for keyword searching and advice on what
to do before you begin, given on this CD. More advanced
tips are also given to you at the
Findspot web site.
In the example below we have typed in just one word as a keyword.
It is not a good idea to do this unless it is a very unique
word.
You will notice that Alta Vista
found 604 106 web pages on the Internet that have the word
"mushrooms".
However, if you choose a unique keyword
such as a phrase that is not likely to be found in many
documents other than the one you are looking for you are
more likely to get a search result that only points to a
few documents. Ideally you want the search result to give
you about 20 or fewer documents to look at. In the example
below, we searched on "merits of procrastination".
Alta Vista found 2 sites.
What you need to practice
in perfecting a search technique is to
find unique words
combine words that define
the topic more narrow
use phrases that are
likely to appear in the document
A multiple or meta-search engine is one
that searches other search engines. Dogpile is one example
of such a site. It is worth trying a keyword search on this
site to see how the results differ. It may find search engines
that give you good results.
For example, we searched on mushrooms
(try this yourself with other keywords as well). Dogpile
also has an information index (like Yahoo) that searches
multiple search engines.
The result of the search is that Dogpile
has looked at about 20 different search engines and you
are likely to find interesting documents to suit your needs.
However, you will need time to look through all the options.
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