• Search Cornell

Lost in Cyberspace?
A Workshop on Internet Search Engines

"Number of occurrences of the word "the" in documents indexed by Alta Vista: 432,118,690"
--Internet Index 16, December 1996

Workshop Schedule

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Hands-on #1: Try a search in Google

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How Search Engines Work [and don't work]:

• Machine indexing and weighting: Robots and Relevance

• Human indexing: Directories and Reviews

• Limitations of search engines:
  • Limited depth of indexing
  • Limited frequency of indexing: changing pages, disappearing pages (404)
  • Limited number of Web sites indexed
  • Limitations of relevance ranking

• Search Engine Watch

  A site containing information on how search engines work, reviews, tutorials, search engine news, and other related topics.

• Berkeley's Guide to Web searching

Finding search engine help/tips

• Tips for searching Alta Vista Simple Search
  • +/-
  • capitalization
  • truncation
  • quotes for phrases
  • constrained searching

• Evaluating What You Find, or, There Is No Rule That Says You Can't Lie on the Internet

  Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages

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Hands-on #2: Now that you know more, try another search.

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Comprehensive search engines:

• Alta Vista

• Google

• Hotbot

• Or choose from this list of the major search engines

Criteria for Evaluating Search Engines:

• Type of Indexing (human or machine)

• Usefulness of Results Ranking (do the most relevant search hits appear first?)

• Coverage/Comprehensiveness (size of database)

• Search software capabilities (phrase searching, Boolean searching, fielded searching)

• Ease of Use (clarity of the user interface)

• Availability/Speed (this is highly variable but some sites are consistently faster)

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Hands-on #3: Try a different search engine. Share the experience.

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Searchable subject directories:

• Yahoo's Subject List

• Librarian's Index to the Internet

• Scout Report

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Hands-on #4: Use a subject directory.

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Multi-engine searching:

• Dogpile Searches Yahoo!, Lycos' A2Z, Excite Guide, World Wide Web Worm, WWW Yellow Pages , What U Seek, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, OpenText, AltaVista, Excite & HotBot.

• MetaCrawler uses nine search engines and combines the results

• all4one searches four engines simultaneously

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Launch Points for Internet Searching:

• Our Reference Searching Page

• Our Subject Guides Page

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Comparing and Evaluating Search Engines

• Basic feature comparison chart [from Kansas City Public Library]

• Detailed feature comparisons [from UC Berkeley]

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Hands-on #5: Free-form, or use our search examples.

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Return to workshop schedule

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Revised 5 March 2004
Michael Engle, Martha Walker & Tony Cosgrave
Reference Department
URL: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/websearch.html

Olin and Uris Libraries, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853
PSA: Public Services and Assessment
Information and reference: 607-255-4144, okuref@cornell.edu
Circulation: (Olin) 607-255-4245, (Uris) 607-255-3537, olincirc@cornell.edu