Search Engines

Making the Most of Search Engines

Are you making the best use of search engines? Here are some general tips, some tips for Google users and some links for further information.

General tips

What are search engines?

A search engine is any software used to search web sites or databases.
Often the term "search engine" is used to mean just the general search engines such as Google and Ask Jeeves that search vast numbers of web sites on the Internet. Different general search engines vary in the amount of the Internet they cover and no one search engine claims to cover the whole Internet
There are also search engines that search individual web sites. For example, at the top of each page on this Virtual Library web site you can see a search box and the phrase 'Site search'. When you enter a word there, a search engine looks for that word on the Virtual Library pages only.

What general search engines are available?

There are links to many search engines on the library's Gateway to the Internet.

How do I use search engines?

Many search engines have some similar features but there can also be significant differences between search engines. It is always best to read each search engine's own 'Help' section to find out how it works.
In particular, if you use a basic search box, you need to know what the search engine does when you enter more than one word. Most general search engines look for pages that include all the words that you enter but some look for pages that include any of the words. Some even look for pages that include the words next to each other as you have written them.
Many search engines have a basic search box and also a link to an 'Advanced search' section. At the 'Advanced search' section you can usually choose how the search engine should look for the words you enter.
Many search engines also enable you to refine your search by limiting results by date, by type of site ('domain') and so on.
Many search engines will treat words entered between inverted commas as a phrase. For example. if you enter "william shakespeare" they will look for those two words together.
Most search engines ignore common words such as 'the', 'and', 'on' etc. However, they will not ignore common words if these are part of a phrase in inverted commas, such as, for example, "Romeo and Juliet".
There are more basic search tips on a useful page from the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Warwick, Searching and Evaluating Web Resources.

Search results tips

When you click on a search result, you may want to find where your search term occurs on the page. You can do a search on the page itself.
If you are using Internet Explorer, just click 'Edit' on your browser and then click 'Find' on the drop-down menu. A search box will appear. Type in the search term, and click 'Find Next'.
You will see your search term highlighted on the page. To see if the term occurs again, click 'Find Next' again and repeat until a message appears telling you there are no more occurrences.
If the page you are looking at has .pdf at the end of its web address it will be in pdf format and you will see that it has a separate toolbar. Click the binoculars icon. A search box will appear. Type in your search term and search.
To see the next occurrences of your search term, depending on the version of your software, either click the smaller binoculars icon, or click on the links in the list that will have appeared on the right of your screen.

Search results tips: evaluating your results

How can you tell which of your search results are worthwhile? Anyone can add web pages to the Internet and what they write could be inaccurate, out-of-date, biased or otherwise useless in a variety of ways.

There are a few basic questions to ask when weighing up the value of a web site:

does the site tell you who wrote it?
does it tell you anything about the qualifications or experience of the author? If so, are they relevant to the information provided?
does the site tell you which organisation produced it? Do you know anything about that organisation?
does the site give contact details for the author or organisation?
what can you glean from looking at the web address? Is it a commercial site?
are there any spelling or grammatical errors? If so, they may imply a lack of attention to detail that may apply to the information content too
are there any obvious factual errors?
when was the web page last updated?
does the information appear to have a particular purpose? For example, is it trying to lead you to buy something?
does the site state the sources for any information it gives?

Tips for Google users

To find Google's own 'Help' pages, click 'more...' on the Google home page, then click 'Help Center' on the menu on the left of the page. At the Help page you will find full details of search features and special Google services.
The sections below highlight some of these plus a few extra tips

Google search tips

When you enter more than one word, Google looks for pages that contain all your words.
If, instead, you want Google to look for any of the words, type OR between them, for example trains OR boats OR planes
To search for words next to each other as a phrase, put them in quotation marks, for example "heartbreak hotel"
Google ignores common words but will not ignore them if you put + immediately before them, for example +where. Google will also not ignore common words if you enter two or more words as a phrase in quotation marks, for example "where is everybody"
You can search terms related to your search term by entering ~ immediately before your term. For example, if you enter ~food Google will also look for the terms nutrition, recipes, restaurants and so on.
A feature that is not on the Google 'Help Center' but that works quite well is putting an asterisk between words in a phrase as a substitute for a word, for example, "where have * the flowers gone". You can put more than one asterisk in a phrase, each one standing in place of a word, for example "how * * * doggy in the window"
At the right of the basic search box there is a link to 'Advanced Search'. The 'Advanced Search' page presents you with boxes that will search for 'all' or 'any' of your keywords or search for them as a phrase. You might find this easier than remembering how to type your search in the basic search box. However, if you can remember how to specify what you want and type it in the basic search box you can achieve more flexibility.
The 'Advanced Search' page also gives you options to limit your search by various features, including by date and by 'domain'. For example, you could limit your results to pages from UK government (local, national etc) sites by entering your search terms and then asking to find only results from the domain .gov.uk. You can also ask for results not to be returned from certain domains. For example, you could exclude .com sites. Note that you can limit to just one domain at a time or exclude just one domain at a time.
Here, for example, is how to search on floods and insurance and find results only from UK governmental sites. At the Advanced Search page, type the two words floods insurance into the first box, then type .gov.uk in the domain box. Click the 'Google Search' button.
Your results now appear on a page that has the basic Google search box at the top. The results are from sites whose addresses all end with .gov.uk
Notice that the search box shows your search terms floods insurance along with another term site:.gov.uk
This new term site: opens up a whole new area of flexibility for you. Although on the 'Advanced Search' page you can limit results to, or exclude, only one domain at a time, if you use the basic search box to specify what you want you can limit to, or exclude, more than one domain at a time.
For example, if we wanted to limit our floods insurance search to results from .gov.uk and .ac.uk sites (to find both governmental and academic sites) we could type in the basic Google search box:

floods insurance site:.gov.uk site:.ac.uk

If we want to exclude a domain, we just put a minus sign in front of our new term site:. For example, to exclude commercial domains we could type in the basic Google search box:

floods insurance -site:com -site:co.uk

Google results tips

You will see the link 'Cached' underneath many Google results. If you click on 'Cached', the page you see might be different from the page you see if you click the usual link (the page title) on the Google results list.
This is because when you click a page title link on the Google results list, you see the web page as it is at the time you click. However, if you click on 'Cached', you will see the page as it was when Google indexed it. The page might have been updated in the period between Google indexing the page and you clicking on the link.
You may find this happens particularly with pages that by their nature are frequently updated, such as newsletters.
You might view a page, notice that your search term does not appear on the page, and wonder why the page came up in your results. If that happens, click 'Cached' and you should then see the page that contains your search term.

Google special features and services

Calculator - in the basic Google search box you can enter figures and use + to add them, - to subtract, * to multiply and / to divide. Click 'Search' to perform the calculation. For full details see Calculator on Google's 'Help' page.
Define - Google can quickly find web site definitions of terms for you. For details see Define on Google's 'Help' page. Remember to evaluate the sources of any definitions!
Google Images - you can click the 'Images' link above the main Google search box and use either the basic search box or an advanced search box to find images
Google Local - you can search for services by place or postcode
Google Print - Google has scanned the full text (or, in some cases, almost the full text) of many new books and made the text searchable. If, when you have done a Google search, there is a small image of a pile of books at the top of your first results page, that means there are scanned books for you to see. Click the image and you will see a list of books in which your search term appears and links to take you to the relevant pages. You can read forward and back through the pages and conduct new searches within each book but you cannot print or save these pages. For further details, see About Google Print.

Links for further information

SearchEngine Watch is the site to go to if you want to learn all about search engines and keep up-to-date with developments
Google Blog will alert you to developments at Google
Contact us if you need further help

Page last updated: 9th September 2005