TOP TIPS ADVANCED WEB SEARCH
Find what you're looking for with our smart search tips 1. WHICH SEARCH ENGINE? Google, the search engine of choice among members, excels at key word searches; searching for 'budget holiday', for example, produces over 55 million hits with websites advertising cheap flights and budget holidays topping the list. Alternatively, you can look through directories, which provide a good overview of a topic. Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) has 14 topics including Recreation & Sports. Under this topic, click on Travel to reveal categories ranging from African American Travel to Women, and a section on Budget Travel. Here, you'll find novel websites such as www.place2stay.net which gives a list of people worldwide who will put you up free of charge. 2. META SEARCHING Meta search engines are a good way to run a comprehensive search, or to compare results from various search engines. One of the better-known of these is Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), which compiles results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask. Other meta search engines include Clusty (www.clusty.com), which groups its search results under headings on the left of the page. 3. PUNCTUATE YOUR WEB SEARCH Using punctuation in your searches makes them more efficient. Putting double quotes around a key phrasesuch as "John Smith" only showspages where the words appear together. Without quotes results such as 'St John's, Smith Square' appear. If you aren't sure whether a word has a hyphen in it or not (email or e-mail, for example), keep the hyphen in. Google will search all variations. Adding a + or - symbol will keep or remove certain words or phrases from search results. So if you wantto search for the Egyptian-themed hotel in Las Vegas, type Egypt + "Las Vegas". A Boolean search is a way of using the uppercase words OR, AND, AND NOT and NOT when looking for results. On major search engines you can use the+ or - and the quote marks instead of the words. 4. BROWSER-BASED SEARCH By default, Firefox includes Google search in the top right of the browser. Click the down arrow to the right ofthe Google icon to switch to alternatives including Wikipedia or eBay. Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has a similar drop-down menu. As with Firefox, click on this to switch search engine. Click Change Search Defaults, select your preferred search engine and then click Set Default to save changes. 5. COLOURFUL SEARCHES There are a number of ways that you can search for images by colour. Chromatik (http://chromatik.labs.exalead.com), part of Exalead's experimental area, allows you to pick colours from a pre-defined palette and then returns images from Flickr (www.flickr.com) that match the colour; you can also enter a keyword. Similarly, the Multicolor Search Lab (http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr) from Idee Inc searches 10 million Flickr images by colour. Alternatively, go to Google's image search www.google.com/images and enter your search term. Click Show options and select a colour to search on. 6. SOCIAL BOOKMARKING Social bookmarking websites such as Digg (digg.com), Delicious (delicious.com) and Reddit (reddit.com) allow their members to recommend interesting articles they've seen online. These tend to be fairly topical, and searching these sites is a good way to find information about current or recent events. All three services offer a search box on their home pages; simply enter the term you're looking for. Digg, for example, lets you sort results by best match, newest and most popular. 7. IMPROVE YOUR IMAGE (search) Most search engines let you perform a specific image search. Go to the homepage of your preferred search engine and look for a link titled Images (or similar). Alternatively, bookmark the image search of your preferred engine: Ask images: www.ask.com/images Bing images: www.bing.com/images Google images: images.google.co.uk Yahoo! Images: images.search.yahoo.com To search for images, enter your search term, "Colosseum, Rome", for example and click Search.Click on advanced image search to limit results by image size or type , file type or to limit search results to display only colour or monochrome images. 8. EXPLORE THE BLOGOSPHERE There are millions of blogs online but only a handful of them are worth reading. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is where Bloglines can help. Bloglines lets you search or subscribe to news feeds and blogs. To sign up for an account go to www.bloglines.com and enter an email address and password. Check your email account (including your junkemail box) for an email from bloglines. This email will contain a link redirecting you to a page where you can subscribe to popular blogs and news feeds including Dilbert Daily Strip and Guardian Unlimited Books. Simply tick those you're interested in and click Subscribe to My Selections. To find other blogs of interest click on the top 1,000 list. 9. LIBRARY LOOKUP Many libraries have digitised their records making these searchable online. The British Library (www.bl.uk), for example, allows you to search over 30,000 records including catalogue records, journal articles and images. Similarly, the US Library of Congress (http://catalog.loc.gov/webvoy.htm) has a catalogue of sources. 10. FILE TYPE SEARCHING Rather than hunting through trillions of HTML-based web pages, you can narrow your search by looking for specific file types. Click on Advanced search and enter your search term. Click on the drop-down menu and select one of the file options. A quick way to search by file type in Google is to include the word filetype: followed by the three-letter file extension and the key words. For example, filetype:pdf Searches PDF files filetype:doc Searches Word documents filetype:ppt Searches PowerPoint files You can also search for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files using the website Docjax (www.docjax.com). 11. WHO'S WHO? If you've come across an unfamiliar website you might, for security reasons, wonder who's behind it. To find out, go to Whois (http://domain.tools.com). Type in the website address (www.which.co.uk, for example) and then click Lookup. 12. ENTERTAINMENT SEARCHES The Internet Movie Database (IMDb, www.imdb.com) is your one-stop shop for information about a movie, TV show or actor. Alternatively, to search for celebrities go to Bing (www.bing.com), click More and then the link to xRank. The tool shows the most searched for celebrities. STEP BY STEP -GOOGLE WONDER WHEEL 1. ENTER YOUR SEARCH Wonder Wheel allows you to visualise a search and to easily find related keywords. Enter a simple search into Google's search box; The Beatles, for example. Click Search. To see the Wonder Wheel, click the blue Show options link. 2. VISUALISE YOUR SEARCH Under the heading StandardView, click Wonder Wheel. This reveals a wheel and spoke-style map showing connections. In our case, this includes The Beatles Songs, The Beatles Lyrics and John Lennon. 3. REFINE YOUR SEARCH Click on a wheel to narrow your search. For instance, if you click on John Lennon this creates another wheel showing searches connected to him, including John Lennon Imagine, John Lennon biography and John Lennon death. STEP BY STEP - ALL THE WEB All The Web searches billions of web pages. The advanced page allows you to define your search closely. Here's how to search for that needle! 1. ACCESS ADVANCED SEARCH Go to www.alltheweb.com and click the blue link titled advanced search. Here, you'll see a number of filters listed - filters are simply a way of narrowing your search. We want to search for information about Tai Chi classes in London. 2. START FILTERING RESULTS At the top of the page in the box titled 'Search for - all of the words' we've typed in Martial Arts. In the text, We've typed Tai Chi into the empty box. To exclude words or phrases from the search, click the drop-down menu. 3. FILTER BY LOCATION You can further narrow your search by type of domain (.uk, .gov., .com, and so on) and by country. We further limited the search to websites updated in the last two years. Our first hit was for the Tai Chi Union of Great Britain - not a bad start. To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
