Advanced Search Techniques

Many people may assume that if they do not get the results they are looking for after the first use of a search engine or browser that the information for which they are looking is not on the Web. This assumption is inaccurate. Because there is no standard for categorizing or presenting information on the Web, you will need to employ a number of strategies to make sure you find the information you are looking for. Using the Web to locate information is a process and, with practice, you can perfect their strategies for using the various resources on the Web.

Search engines can be very powerful if you are aware of the advanced functions they offer for locating specific types of information.

Advanced Search. Almost all search engines offer an "Advanced Search" feature that allow you to refine your search beyond a few keywords. On the Google home page, this feature can be seen as a link to the right of the text field:

The "Advanced Search" feature allows you to further refine your search criteria by:

• including or excluding terms;
• requiring the presence of both terms in a specific order, or as a phrase;
• limiting the language in which the Web page is written;
• limiting the date the Web page was created; and/or
• limiting the placement of the word on the page: in the title, text, URL, or links of the page.

You can invoke an "Advanced Search" by means of a more complex search form:

Let's return to our query on puppies. At the time of writing, if you complete a simple search on puppies using Google, approximately 760,000 hits are returned. The hits represent a plethora of Web sites and pages, including sites about caring for puppies, pictures of various breeds of puppies, information about breeding puppies, and so on, all of which might contain information for which the user is looking. However, also included in the results are sites with information about Hush Puppies shoes, Pound Puppies dolls, songs and stories about puppies, and much more! If you can further identify what you would like to know about puppies, you can use the "Advanced Search" function to further limit the number of Web sites and pages you would have to read through to find the relevant information.

Let's say we actually want to find information on house training a toy poodle puppy. You can use the "Advanced Search" function in Google to limit the number of returned hits, by searching for all the words "toy poodle puppy" and with the exact phrase "house training":

The Web site or page that contains the relevant information will include all the words "toy" and "poodle" and "puppy," as well as the phrase "house training." (You might also include "toy poodle" as a phrase since the words will, most likely, appear next to each other on the Web page.) In this example, we have also limited the language of the Web pages to English. Once all of the relevant search criteria has been included, you click the "Google Search" button.

The results page looks the same as the regular Google search results page:

However, there are only 198 hits returned instead of 760,000. The first four Web sites listed look relevant to the specific information which we are looking for.

There are other ways of achieving the same results with Google and other search engines, by employing other advanced search operators, including Boolean search terms, phrase searching, and wildcards. To achieve the same results as the "Advanced Search" above at Google, you would need to employ Boolean and operators as well as phrase searching. Your query would be:

+toy +poodle +puppy "house training"

The results to this query will be the same as those returned by the "Advanced Search" we performed above. Below you will find an explanation of these advanced search operators.

Boolean Operators. Most search engines allow the use of Boolean operators. There are 3 Boolean operators that allow users to refine their queries. These operators are: AND/+, OR, and NOT/-.

Phrase Searching. To search for a phrase, surround the words with quotation marks. Encapsulating the phrase in quotation marks will return only those Web sites and pages that include those two words next to each other, in that precise order, instead of all Web sites and pages that include those words anywhere on the page. A search for "house and training" returns 2, 670,000 hits, while a search for "house training" returns only 124,000 hits.

Wildcards. The techniques above are generally used to narrow a search, or provide fewer relevant search results. To broaden a search, or provide more search results, you may want to search for all forms of a word, often called wildcards. To use this technique type an asterisk (*) after the root of the word you want to find. For example, to find pages that include either the word puppy or puppie, type "pupp*". However, this search will also return instances of all other words that begin with "pupp", such as puppet.

It is important to note that not all search engines offer all these features. Many search engines will implement these features in different ways. Before attempting to use advanced search operators, you should read the search engine's Help section. Some search engines offer very helpful tutorials on using their service and/or tips for improving your search results:

• Google's Advanced Search Made Easy
• Altavista's Special Search Terms

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M O R E   P R A C T I C E Find the answers to the following questions using Google or another search engine. Try using the various search techniques and strategies presented in this lesson. :: What is George W. Bush's mother-in-law's name? :: Who was the first superintendent for the Chicago Board of Education? :: What is Illinois State Goal 7, CAS B for the fourth grade? :: Who was the first black alderman in Chicago? :: Who was the first Nobel prize winner from the University of Chicago (faculty or alumni)?