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Advanced Search
Search Hints & Tips
How do Search Engines Actually Work?
Search engines use software to spider the Web and create their databases. These are alsosometimes called robots, web crawlers, or worms. Web pages are retrieved and indexed by these search engines. When you enter a query at a search engine, your input is checked against the search engine's keyword indices. The best matches are then returned to you as matches.
Each search engine indexes pages differently. When a URL is submitted to a search engine, it sends out a spider to index the site and indexes (catalogs) selected information from the web page.
Using Search Engines
If you already know the website address, go directly to an address or site:
- Each web page on the Internet has its own unique address or URL. If you know the web address of the site you want to go to then click in the Location box at the top of the Netscape / Internet Explorer screen.
- Type the www address exactly into the box e.g. www.nuim.ie
- Hit return. You will be brought directly to the web page
To use:
- To search using one of the Search Engines click on the Search button at the top of the browser screen. You will be brought to a page on whbich a search engine is chosen at random. From here you can type in your query.
- Alternatively, just go directly to the search engine you prefer - some of the best ones are listed on the menu to the right of the screen.
- Once in the search engine page type the word or phrase you are searching for in the search box and click on the search button.
- Your results will be returned to you, and unless you have been very specific you could have up to tens of thousands of results. The search engine will rank them in order of relevance so that usually only the first 20 -30 will be most relevant to you.
- Each web page that has been found will be summarised by the search engine so you can decide at a glance which pages to view. Click on the hyperlink to view the web page.
Inputting a word like 'car' into a search engine will return potentially hundreds of thousands of results. You'd then need all day to go through each page retreived by the search engine on which the word car occurrs to find the information you want.
This is why it's important to learn how to make effective searches, which will return the result you're looking for. If you're looking for information on a specific car, then it makes sense to tailor your query, so that you reduce the number of results returned, and of the results you do get, they are much more likely to contain the quality of information you're looking for.
Tips For Effective Searching
To help you make the most specific queries, follow these instructions:
Search engines use maths to return results based on the word(s) you typed in to their search box:
Simple Search Operators:
+ (and)
- (not)
* (truncation)
Advanced Boolean Searching
AND = & e.g. Cow AND Pat
OR = | e.g. (school OR information) AND courses
NOT= ! e.g. arts AND NOT craft
NEAR= ~ TD ~ bribe
(this operator will find documents with the specified words within 10 words of each other).
Truncation
Use an (*) to broaden your search
e.g. clone* will search for clone, clones, cloning, cloned
Exact Phrases
If you are looking for an exact phrase put it in quotes
e.g. "to be or not to be".
Names / People (use quotation marks)
e.g; "John Doe"
Case Sensitivity
Use only lower case unless you want your search to be case sensitive. If you search for Maynooth you will only retrieve records with Maynooth in them, whereas maynooth will retrieve all references in upper and lower case.