Choose Best Search Engine

Choose Best Search Engine

http://websearch.about.com/internet/sites/websearch/library/weekly/aa120498.htm

Try this quiz:
Your job is to cut a wooden board in half. You have your choice of four tools. Which one is
best for the job?
A) A hammer
B) A saw
C) A blowtorch
D) Scissors

This isn't a trick question! Most people would choose a saw, because it's the "obvious" tool to get the job done. Nonetheless, it's possible to use a hammer, a blowtorch, or scissors to cut a board in half. The only problem with those tools is that the results will be messy, or the job will take a long time. There are also "obvious" choices when it comes to choosing the best search tool. Unfortunately, many people don't take the time to think about it-they simply fire up their favorite search engine and plug in keywords like dollars in a slot machine, hoping to hit a jackpot. And, much to their disappointment, the results are often messy, or the search takes a long time. To paraphrase the famous lyric, they're "searching for answers in all the wrong places."

It's relatively easy to learn how to choose the best search tool for any given type of search. Though they might seem similar, search engines and directories have very different characteristics. They each have strengths and weaknesses, and if you understand these you will not only get better results, you'll spend a lot less time coming up with frustrating or useless results.

This article has three parts, each focusing on the most common types of Web searches. Part one shows you how to choose the best general-purpose search engine for about a dozen specific types of queries, ranging from broad overviews to pinpoint targets. Part two focuses on this site's two most popular net links categories: finding people and searching for images. And part three shows you the best ways to find answers to specific questions-almost like having your own personal online reference librarian.

Each section is organized into a table, with "Searching For" phrases on the left, and links to "Best Bets" on the right. If you take the time to master these basic concepts, and learn how to choose the best search tool for any given query, you'll become an expert at searching the Web in no time.
How to Choose the Best Search
Chris Sherman To bookmark this feature, use this URL:
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Choose the Best Search Engine
How To Choose The Best General-purpose Search Tool

Searching For...
Best Bets:

A broad overview of a subject.
Looksmart is a topical directory of the Web, with more than 24,000 categories to choose from. A subject using a short phrase of two or three words. Infoseek recognizes phrases, and won't ignore the most common words that other search engines discard.

The answer to a plain English question.
Ask Jeeves has the answers to more than 7 million common questions, and understands plain English queries.

A topic using rare or uncommon words.
Because AltaVista is the largest Web index, it will find the most documents about rare or uncommon subjects.

The most popular Web sites on a subject.
Search using HotBot, then click on the "Get the Top 10 Most Visited Sites For [Your Query] link, at the top of your results list.

Web pages in a specific language.
Both AltaVista and HotBot let you restrict your search to specific languages.

Web pages that were published on a specific date.
AltaVista's Advanced Search and HotBot's Super Search find documents created within a specific date range.

The most comprehensive results for a topic.
Dogpile and Metacrawler are meta-search engines, meaning they simultaneously scan the indexes of multiple search engines and present you with all of the results.
The ability to search within the results of a search.
Infoseek lets you refine your search using only the results from a previous query.

"Smart results" for cities, companies, or sports teams.
Excite prioritizes results for these types of searches, presenting you with city information including maps and weather, company news and information, and sports schedules, stats, and scores.
Sites that have paid to get top listings in search results.
GoTo.com allows Web masters to bid for position on search results for specific terms.

A browsable directory of quality links that have been evaluated by experts.
All links in every Mining Co. Guide site have been carefully chosen by topic experts.
http://websearch.about.com/internet/sites/websearch/library/weekly/bl_981204b.htm
Choose the Best Search Engine

Dateline: 12/04/98 Updated: 03/24/99 People Finders and White Pages

People and Imige Finders; White Pages

Searching For...
Best Bets:

A person's address or phone number.
Bigfoot is very fast, and accepts queries in several languages other than English. InfoSpace is one of the best people finder directories, including global telephone and address search.

The owner of a phone number.
InfoSpace has a reverse lookup-just enter the number and it will tell you who it belongs to.

A person's email address.
The World Email Directory contains more than 8,000,000 email addresses. MESA searches seven Web email directories in parallel, then organizes results by name, listing all known directory entries.
A person's Web site.
Ahoy! Search for personal home pages on the Web.

Information about family and ancestors.
Internet FamilyFinder. Enter a name into Family Tree Maker's ancestry archive, and if it finds a match you can download the entire family tree.
A celebrity's address.
Celebrity Home And E-mail Addresses Search has addresses for movie stars, musicians, politicians-even Internet executives.

Searching For... Best Bets: Clip art for a Web page.
Mining Co. Guide Bobbie Peachey's Web Clip Art site is hands-down the most comprehensive on the Web.
Photographs.
Corbis has more than a million photos from a variety of perspectives, eras, geographical regions, news, celebrity, and special collections.

A general-purpose image search engine.
WebSEEk's search results are returned as thumbnail images with filenames and a link to the Web site where the image was found. With more than 660,000 images cataloged, this is by far the most useful image-specific search engine on the Web.
Multimedia files.
Scour.Net is an index of millions of audio, video, and animation files, complete with a directory of multimedia rich Web sites.
http://websearch.about.com/internet/sites/websearch/library/weekly/bl_981204c.htm

Reference Search Engines

These search sites focus on very narrow categories, and are ideal when you need to find a specific fact quickly and without fuss.

Searching For...
Best Bets:

Dictionaries.
One-Look Dictionaries lets you search for definitions of more than 1.5 million words in 220 online dictionaries.

A thesaurus.
Plumb Design's Visual Thesaurus creates a map of related words. By clicking on words, you follow a thread of meaning, creating a spatial map of linguistic associations. Requires Java.

Famous quotations.
Search for quotations from classic authors using Project Bartleby, and from the ninth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Encyclopedia descriptions.
Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Third Edition. This outstanding reference work features 17,000 articles with more than 170,000 links to other resources on the Web. Also, the Information, Please Almanac which evolved from the famous quiz show program, is now online, searchable and almost unbeatable as the resource for finding even obscure facts.

A biography of a famous person.
The Biographical Dictionary contains biographies of more than 22,000 notable men and women who have shaped our world from ancient times to the present day.

A calculator for just about anything.
Calculators Online Center has links to thousands of scientific, math, financial, engineering, hobby and a vast variety of other online calculators.

Statistics.
Statistical Resources on the Web is a comprehensive directory of statistics resources, arranged by topic.

http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/EDTEC572/FindingInfo.html

Finding Information on the Web:

The Sevenfold Path to Knowledge

Bernie Dodge, San Diego State University http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec572/FindingInfo.html

No matter what you're interested in, there are relevant resources available to you on the World Wide Web. With over 50 million documents out there already, finding what you need is a challenge. Fortunately, various search engines are being developed that make it easier to find things than ever before. By mastering their use and knowing a few additional tricks, you'll soon be able to find good links quickly on almost any topic. For purposes of this class, I've boiled it down to 7 steps.

Step 1: Familiarize Yourself with the Best Three General Search Engines. From month to month, the pecking order of search engines changes like a slow motion horse race. A search tool that burst on the scene in February and got rave reviews might be superceded and left in the dust by May. The competition among companies to improve the scope, speed and features of each package keeps the process in flux and generally works to our advantage as users. It's worth your while to keep an ear to the ground and know which two or three are the best at a given time. So what's best right now? It's a subjective call, but in my own humble opinion the three best search engines as of September, 1996 are: Infoseek Ultra, Alta Vista, and Lycos

Exercise
Take a few minutes to explore each site. Type in a phrase (put it in quotes to keep the words together) at each site and see what comes up. Try finding "Robert Gagne". Try "cooperative learning". Try something extremely obscure like "Sherbro" and count up the number of relevant hits from each of the three engines. Not all the sites found will be relevant. In most cases, the most relevant sites will be those in which your search phrase is used most often and nearest to the beginning of the document. What kinds of things did you find for these three phrases in these three sites? For the "Sherbro" search, which search engine worked best?

Step 2: Familiarize Yourself with the Fine Points of Using Each Search Engine.

It's so easy to do simple searches like those you did in Step 1 that it's tempting to stop at that level of use. To become an info-guru, though, you need to take the time to try out the more advanced features of each engine. These allow you to do Boolean searches to combine and exclude different terms, and to focus your seeking in a number of ways.

Exercise
At the Infoseek Ultra site, notice the button labelled "Special". This opens up a form that you can use for a variety of advanced techniques. One thing that you can do with this form is to start with a relevant web page and find out what other web pages have included a link to that page. For example, there's a useful page at Columbia University that contains readings about Constructist teaching. If another page somewhere else includes a link to that page, it's likely that the keeper of that page is also interested in that topic. Use the advanced search form at InfoSeek Ultra and find pages that are linked to this URL: http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext/readings.html. What do you find? The advanced search form also allows you to do a search on the title of a web page. There are zillions of pages that make reference to teaching strategies, but the ones that have "teaching strategies" in their title are the ones most closely focused on that topic. Use the Title search part of InfoSeek Ultra's form to identify those sites. How many are there? How many are there if you simply search for "teaching strategies" without narrowing the search to the Title?

To do a more fine-tuned search on Alta Vista, click on the button labelled "Advanced" at the top of the screen. Notice that you can put together strings of words in a variety of combinations. Suppose you were preparing to travel to Waterbury, Connecticut and wanted to find out about places to stay and restaurants to eat at. Suppose also that you knew that there is also a Waterbury, Vermont and that you didn't want those more rural references cluttering up your search.

Using the advanced search tool on Alta Vista, try typing in the following line in the Selection Criteria box: Waterbury and (Connecticut or CT) and not (Vermont or VT)

... and in the Results Ranking Criteria box below it, type restaurants hotels

How many sites do you get? Try narrowing and broadening the same search by adding or subtracting terms. To learn more about the use of Boolean terms on Alta Vista, click on the Help button at the upper right of the search page.

Step 3: Familiarize Yourself with USENET Newsgroups as a Source of Current, Unfiltered Information

One of the wonders of the internet is the institution of over 14,000 newsgroups in which questions are posted and answered constantly by people around the world. Each newsgroup is devoted (in theory) to a single, very specific topic. The newsgroups are organized into broad categories like comp (computers), rec (recreation), alt (alternative), and so on. You can examine the list of newsgroups by looking at the Usenet Info Center Launch Pad and clicking on the item "Browse the Usenet Groups".

To find newsgroups devoted to a specific topic, click on the "Search for a Usenet Group" link.

Exercise Using the "Search for a Usenet Group" form, find the names of newsgroups in which "Italy" or "Italian" appear in the group titles, short description or long description of the group. How many newsgroups do you find? Newsgroup postings can be searched using the Deja News search engine. Use Deja News and see what you can find out about Venetian Glass. There are four more steps... to be completed soon. The next one has to deal with organizing what you find. Here's the key element that you'll need...

Step 4: Find a Way to Organize Your Findings

If you spend any time at all looking for things on the Web, you'll soon have hundreds of sites that you want to go back to. The Bookmarks function of Netscape leaves a lot to be desired. It's not very portable, and it's down right clunky. What's an information junkie to do? Download a piece of software that will help you keep and organize URL's in files that are specific to a given project.

My personal favorite software of this type (at the moment) is called URL Manager Pro. You can download a demo copy from the URL Manager Home Page, and I highly recommend that you do so as soon as possible. http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/EDTEC572/embedding.html

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march97/bt/03pollock.html

What's Wrong with Internet Searching

Annabel Pollock Andrew Hockley
Human Factors Unit, BT Laboratories, Ipswich, UK
annabel.pollock@bt-sys.bt.co.uk
andrew.hockley@bt-sys.bt.co.uk

D-Lib Magazine, March 1997 ISSN 1082-9873

Paper first presented at 'Designing for the Web: Empirical Studies' conference hosted by Microsoft Usability Group October 30, 1996 Microsoft Corporate Headquarters Redmond, Washington

Abstract
This paper argues that the model of searching for information on the Web as used by many existing search engines does not meet the needs of Internet-naive (but PC-literate) users. This is based on two user trials carried out in the summer of 1995 with people who had not encountered the Internet before. Results show that potential users need at least some understanding of basic Internet concepts in order to carry out successful searches. Without this understanding, potential customers are likely to be discouraged from taking up Internet services after initial bad experiences.

1.0 Introduction and Objectives
The Internet's potential as a major revenue earner can only be realised if users can find exactly what they want on the Internet quickly, accurately, and with little effort. The development of tools which support the finding of relevant material within a few mouse clicks and key strokes is becoming increasingly critical, given the unprecedented rate at which the Web is growing and the rising numbers of novice users. Two user trials were carried out during August and October 1995 to collect information to support the construction of navigation tools for ordinary users (rather than 'netsurfers'). The trials aimed to understand how people currently search for information in their everyday lives, and then to incorporate these processes into a prototype search engine in order to ensure its usability and acceptability.

2.0 Trial Procedure
All participants in both trials were deliberately not Internet users. Fourteen members of the public of mixed ages, demographics, and little computing experience took part in the first trial. In order to determine whether the results also applied to PC-literate customers, the second trial deliberately targeted eighteen customers who used computers on a regular basis - either adult males between the ages of 20 and 45, or teenagers of either sex. The results from both trials were remarkably similar, which suggests that familiarity with PCs does not affect the ease with which novice users can find information on the Internet. The procedure for both trials was the same. Participants were introduced to the Internet and briefed about its nature. They were asked about the latest product or information they had searched for 'in the real world', and encouraged to discuss the approach they had taken. They then attempted to replicate that search using a variety of Internet search engines such as Lycos, Webcrawler, and Yahoo.

Example Search Results

3.0 Trial Results - Misconceptions about the Internet

The Internet as a Global Resource
Most participants from both trials had heard of the Internet, but none of them really understood its global nature and what was implied by this. For example, several users were surprised that many of their search results were from international sources. They expected that information returned would be local (even to the Suffolk region rather than to the UK as a whole) which meant that search results

from places such as Minnesota were completely unexpected and unfathomable. The Internet as an Unmanaged Resource
Users expected information to be returned to them in a clear and indexed fashion. This meant that the concept of iterative searching and matching information in terms of relevance was poorly grasped. In other words, users did not use the Internet with the premise of 'if this doesn't work, I'll try this'; instead, they assumed anything less than a perfect match was an irrevocable failure. Our participants often assumed that the Internet did not have relevant information when results returned to them did not appear to make sense, when in fact their queries were answerable.

The Scope of the Internet
Users could not begin to understand the range and nature of the material that the Internet offered. Many were surprised at its scope - for example, after searching for information about Bob Marley, one participant was convinced that the authors had deliberately preselected information that would interest him: "How did you get all this stuff on there for me then? I mean, I've just walked in off the street, how did you know to have stuff in on Bob Marley and that?"

4.0 Trial Results - Problems with Search Engines

The Searching Concept
Most participants were happy with the concept of searching and finding when given a clear world example, such as finding some reading material for their holidays. However, they were confused by the concept of telling a computer an area of interest and getting some possible satisfier returned. For example, although users could understand the notion of going to a library and asking the librarian for information, these same users failed to understand the notion of using a search engine to find articles of interest on the Internet, even though the two processes are logically identical. One participant commented: "What kind of brain capacity do you need to access the information? I wouldn't have the first clue how to set things out so I could find things. . . ."
Quality of Hits
Very few users were impressed with the quality of information the Internet contained. None of the participants said they found anything that would make them bother to use it, as they already had access to better quality alternatives. For example, a highly technically literate user (air force weapons technician) wanted to find information about Liverpool Football Club, and eventually found the Liverpool FC home page complete with match reports, interviews, pictures of stars, etc. Despite the fact that this site offers fans a vast amount of well-presented information about the club, the participant claimed that teletext and newspapers were quicker and easier, and offered better quality information. The speed and difficulty of searching and finding information to match requirements is clearly a critical factor influencing this (commonly held) perception. One user who required a lot of prompting to help him find what he wanted commented: "Good grief, all this to get to where I want to"
Search Terms
Nearly all participants from both trials had difficulty formulating good searching keywords even when they had all the information they needed. In the real world, users go into a library or a shop and express their requirements in verbose or imprecise terms, or alternatively they browse through items on offer. They are not used to elaborating an artificial text string to match their requirements. Common errors included: An expectation that the computer would understand requests expressed in natural language - for example, one user entered "I would like to buy a CD by The Commitments".
Trying to express several searches simultaneously.
Over or under specifying search requests - for example, one person wanted to find information on UK Local Education Authority student grants, and searched on "grants".

Misspellings.

Example Results
The central problem was that users did not seem to understand what were likely to be good quality differentiators. Thus one participant looking for Reebok trainers searched for 'sports shoes' rather than the more discriminatory 'Reebok'. Another entered 'competitive market share' when trying to find information about competitors for the Rover car company, not realising that he had to enter at least some contextual element.

Requisite World Knowledge
An unexpected finding was the degree to which participants lacked the necessary world knowledge that is required to make use of the Internet. Many users made requests that could easily have been satisfied if they had been in possession of crucial pieces of information. Some examples of this included:

not realising that Wales is part of Europe: "I want information on Snowdon and all that's in there is information on European mountains".

not realising that Lonely Planet was a travel guides company. One user found the Lonely Planet home page, but assumed his search had been unsuccessful because he didn't realise the site could offer him useful information about holidays in the USA.

5.0 Conclusions and Recommendations

The trials indicated that the process of finding information via search engines was simply too complicated for Internet-naive people to use without very high levels of support. It was suspected that none of the participants would have bothered to work out how to use the tools shown to them had they been left alone. Common remarks included:

"I'd need a couple of hours . . I'd press all the wrong keys if you left me alone." The authors believe that the key Internet misconceptions as described in this paper are both widespread and enduring. More recent focus groups carried out by the authors indicated that some users who have had Internet access for over a year (and who claim to 'surf' on a regular basis) are still having problems using search engines: ". . .it came up with streams and streams of information and it just took ages to scroll through it all -- and it never came up with anything particularly useful. . .I then tried to enter words that were more specific to what we wanted, but in the end I just gave up because I couldn't find anything."

The following recommendations are made to help the ease with which information can be found:

Search engines should concentrate on doing simple searches well, before trying to support more sophisticated users. Evidence from subsequent trials has found that users are put off by the terms 'advanced search' or 'expert search' and seldom read 'hints and tips', believing these functions to be for experienced users.

Search results should be returned to users as quickly as possible. Clear "in progress" indicators to reassure users that something is happening will help improve confidence in the effectiveness of search tools.

Users are much happier searching for information from hierarchical categories rather than keywords. Our research found that Yahoo was the most popular search engine, largely because it leads users through the process of browsing through categories (like a library), rather than requiring them to formulate searching keywords.

Search engines should aim to communicate the concept that searching on the Internet is a process rather than an event. It is relatively rare to find something useful as a result of a first search. An important design goal is therefore to engineer this view of search as a process into the interface itself. This has obvious implications for the wording of the instructions used, for example expressing search results as "suggestions" rather than "hits". Intelligent support for users' search requests is clearly needed. For example, one participant searched for a reggae performer, Bitty McLean, but no entries were found because she had misspelled the name. An intelligent search engine would have returned "sorry, no Bitty Maclean, but lots of Bitty McLean". Spell-checking facilities would also be useful.

The results support the development of search engines which offer localised geographical searching (rather than just making an Intranet - Internet distinction), such as UK Yahoo.

Online service subscribers could do more to offer Internet subscription with a set of quality sites already bookmarked, according to the interests of the target community. This would reduce the need for novice users to understand searching concepts immediately.

Non-Internet based briefing material or advertising to communicate the advantages of getting on-line, and explaining basic functionality in non-technical terms, would go a long way towards dispelling the misconceptions described in this study. If novice users had at least some understanding of what the Internet is about, they would then find it much easier to find useful information.

The results also have implications for issues which commercially-available Internet training packages should address, and how they should be positioned. There is a real risk that potential Internet users will be alienated unless they have a simple understanding of basic Internet concepts, however polished the interface design of search engines.

6.0 Bibliography

1. Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box columns on the Sun Microsystems Web site. <http://www.sun.com/columns/jakob>
2. Hix, D., & Hartson, R. (1993). Developing user interfaces. New York: Wiley.

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