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Hide and go seek
Learning to search the web
By: David K. Every
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2002-03-11 08:35:59
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 ne of the most important things in a users "Web Experience" is learning how to search the Internet. Most users haven't spent more than 2 minutes learning how to search, and never even clicked the "advanced" search link on their favorite search engines. No wonder so many users are frustrated because they can't find anything, or find 10,000 things they don't care about.
Don't get me wrong; there is an inherent problem with language and trying to tell a computer exactly what you want. Computers are stupid, they can't think, and will do exactly what you tell them to in the dumbest, most literal way. So if you ask for a word, they just blindly look for all occurrences of that word; and on the web, that is a bazillion irrelevant results, and only by luck will you find your needle in that haystack. So you have to learn how to talk to the computer and help it.
Anything you can do to limit the number of possible results, will filter out lots of the garbage (noise) that you don't want. If you can limit by category, time (how recent), type (is it an image, a song, a page, etc.), topic, or give it more words that are relevant to what you're doing, then that will get you closer to the few files that you really have interest in; rather than swamp you with all the ones you don't care about.
For example, I'm looking at finishing my basement, and have interest in techniques for framing the walls. If I search for the word "finishing" on Yahoo, I got 792 results, many had to do with finishing metal, cars, books, walls, furniture, hair, people, guns, copiers; and I'm sure somewhere in there is something on basements.
One way I can narrow down the scope, is to just get to sites or areas in a site on the rough topic; and then search that. So if I search on "home improvement", I got many sites on that subject. Searching each of them on basements, was tedious, but had lots of information and links to exactly what I was looking for. So I helped narrow what I was looking for, and got better results; and you need to pick which word/idea that you're looking for carefully.
Another way to narrow the results is to give more hints to the search engine. The computer can't intuit what you want, so you have to tell it. When I did the same search, but put many relevant words in there; like "wall framing basement", it gave the search engine a better hint as to what I was looking for, and it ordered the results better.
There's some logic as to what the search engine is doing. Usually it is doing an "OR" search, searching for 'this OR that", and finding any of those words. If you use AND (or the '+' as an abbreviation), you are telling it you need all of those words. And if you give it more hints, like "NOT" some words (abbreviated as '-') that can help more. And lastly if you wrap something in quotes, you can tell it you're looking for an exact phrase (those words together) instead of anything with any of those words in them. And order (first things first) is a hint at importance (first things first). Also different search engines are better at different things, so it is a good idea to try some searches on different search engines and compare the results.
So I searched for; +wall +framing +"2x4" -contractor -insulation (since those last two were creating lots of results that I didn't have interest in). And I got a much better result.
Usually finding what you want on the web takes a little trial and error to get what you care about. But it is a skill that can be learned, and it is usually faster and cheaper than going down to the library or searching store to store, trying to find what you want.
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