| Research Page | Language Studies Home | USNA Home |
|---|
With literally millions of Web pages containing billions of words and located in dozens of countries accessible from your desktop, you need to know how to find useful information sources fast, and how to reject less relevant documents without inspecting each individually. Enter the Search Engine, a tool that can quickly consult its index of Weblications and return a list of all that meet your search criteria (presence / absence of combinations of terms).
Search engines compile their indices by relentlessly roving the Web, by using information supplied by Web page authors, the content of the web pages themselves, and in some cases (e.g. Yahoo) by having humans visit, evaluate, and classify the sites. Metasearch engines evaluate the contents of several search indices simultaneously. A review of the major U.S. search engines (most of which cover the world) discussing their strengths and weaknesses and offering tips for using them can be found among c|net's reviews. Another more general set of search tips from Internet World is here.
Links to the major search sites are found on the home page at http://www.search.com, which also links you to over 250 specialized search engines (phone numbers, movie reviews, downloadable software etc.).
On the Language Studies Resource Page I provide links to several international search engines under the French and German sections, as well as a link to Eurolink, which in turn has links to national server lists and search engines from 15 European countries. Click here for server lists and search engines in countries around the world. On the Research Page I have links to several search engines as well as search forms for what I find to be the fastest and most useful search engine, Digital's Alta Vista. Alta Vista provides an index to over 25 million web pages, and has fast and efficient search tools. The procedure for Advanced Queries is outlined below, and is described in great detail in the on-line help at Alta Vista. If your keywords "hit" on too many documents to be useful, Alta Vista's "Live Topics" feature allows you to in/exclude additional terms found in the documents to narrow the search further.Tip: You can download this bare-bones Alta Vista Advanced Query front end and save it as a local file [Ctrl-S or File-Save As], e.g. C:\NETSCAPE\ALTAVIST.HTM. Start Netscape, then open this file [Ctrl-O or File-Open File] to start a search without waiting for Alta Vista to send you the form. Alternatively, load the Research Page as the first page after starting Netscape. Then, any time you open a new browser window [Ctrl-N or File-Web Browser] you will have immediate access to both Simple and Advanced Query Forms.
Alta Vista also indexes Usenet and provides access to recent articles from all of the almost 15,000 newsgroups (including foreign ones), not only the thousand or so newsgroups available here at USNA. Newsgroups are the electronic meetingplace of the Net. Their ongoing discussions contain much that is banal, but some useful content can be found there as well. The wise Usenet reader subjects any information found in Usenet articles to critical analysis before taking it to be true. Complete archives of Usenet articles (less binary files, i.e. programs, graphics, sounds and other multimedia) and a very powerful search engine are at http://www.dejanews.com.
To perform a search, you enter search terms into a search window, then click on a button to submit the query. A few seconds later, a page appears in your browser showing how many matching documents were found and containing brief excerpts with links to those documents. If there are many matches, additional links at the bottom of the page can be clicked to retrieve additional sets of matching documents.
Efficient use of any search engine requires an understanding of how it works, and that takes clicking on the help link, reading, and practice. Allow yourself an hour or two to become familiar with the possibilities of the search engine you are using. Here are a few tips on Alta Vista. Other search engines have similar conventions differing mainly in the details.
Simple Queries identify all Web pages on which words or phrases entered in the search window occur anywhere on the page. If the original text is in a foreign language (many web pages abroad are in English only or have an English translation available, to accommodate foreign visitors), the text to be matched must be entered in that language. The search engine has no way of matching a correct spelling to an incorrect one (whether the error was in the search window or in the target document). Since low-content high-frequency words such as is, the, but are not useful in identifying documents, they are not indexed.
You may also specify to look only at the pages' title, url, host, links and images. These "page component" operators are separated from the target term by a : host:de will find only pages on servers in Germany (de at the end of the host name is the country code for Germany; other common country codes are listed here at the end of this document). The Alta Vista search engine now also permits the user to specify which language to match documents in, to filter out spurious hits. Since not all non-US URLs end in country codes, and not all information found at foreign sites is in the language of the country, this is a more reliable means of finding foreign-language materials.
Here are some search examples:
link:nadn.navy.mil/LangStudy/ AND NOT url:nadn.navy.mil
matches pages outside USNA with links to any Language Studies pages
(title:cologne OR title:koln) AND host:de AND (image:jpg OR image:gif)
returns links to pages in Germany with images on them and with Cologne or Köln in the
title
The terms to search for and the logical operators to combine them are entered in the Selection Criteria Window. You can also enter terms in the Results Ranking Criteria window to sort documents so that those containing (or lacking) certain terms are listed first. These sorting criteria may be different from the original selection criteria.
Using combinations of the features listed here (plus other tips to be found in Alta Vista Help) will save you time which you would otherwise spend plowing through documents. For example, to find documents from Germany that deal with recycling and to list first those mentioning der grüne Punkt (a recycling symbol), enter the following:
Word count: grun* punkt: about 51Alta Vista found 51 instances of der grüne Punkt
Documents 1-10 of 38 matching some of the query terms, best matches first.
| at Austria | au Australia | be Belgium | br Brazil | ca Canada |
| ch Switzerland | cl Chile | co Colombia | cr Costa Rica | ec Ecuador |
| de Germany | dk Denmark | es Spain | fi Finland | fr France |
| gt Guatemala | jp Japan | lu Luxemburg | mx Mexico | ni Nicaragua |
| nl Netherlands | no Norway | pe Peru | pl Poland | ru Russia |
| se Sweden | uk United Kingdom | ur Uruguay | us United States | za South Africa |
| Top of Page | Research Page | Language Studies Home | USNA Home |
|---|
EDITED BY: AssocProf William H. Fletcher, Language Studies Dept., US
Naval Academy
REVISION: 16 Sept 97
URL:
http://www.usna.navy.mil/LangStudy/search.html