Seven Steps Toward Better Searching

My plump The first two basic tools to practice with the simple search are the use of + and - to include or exclude words. For example, if you wanted to find sites about Atlantis, the purported lost continent, and you wanted to eliminate all pages that were about Atlantis, the space shuttle. Note: There's no space between the + or - and the word, but there is a space between words. You'd type +Atlantis -shuttle (i.e., +Atlantis space -shuttle) NOT +Atlantis-shuttle (i.e., +Atlantis nospace -shuttle) Try each of the searches now, and record how many sites you find. As you do each search, take note of what kinds of things turn up. Notice that the more specific the terms you include and exclude, the more focused your search.

Query # Matches +Atlantis 241,757 +Atlantis -shuttle 215,857 +Atlantis -shuttle +continent +Atlantis -shuttle +continent -film -movie NEWSFLASH! March 7, 2001. Altavista recently made a change in their search engine so that the + is always assumed. (That is, they assume that if you typed in a word, you really want it included). Some other search engines still use the +, so we're keeping it in this page for now. We'll have to come up with a new mnemonic soon to replace Plump :-) Thanks to Cheryl Nielsen of Clear Lake, Iowa for alerting me to the change!

Starfish A common mistake people make is to inadvertantly narrow their search too much by excluding variations on a word they're looking for. For example, if you typed in +mushrooms, you'd miss all those pages that just had the singular word mushroom on them. The * wildcard stands for any letter(s). The wildcard is also useful for catching other variations on a word such as different forms of a verb. In general, never search for the plural of a word. Use the wildcard and get both the singular and plural forms.

Query # Matches mushrooms mushroom* surf* surf* -surface*

Quickly If you type a sequence of words in as a query, AltaVista will look for documents that contain any of those words. If you want the words to hang together as a phrase, you should put double quotes around them. Try these: AltaVista recently added a phrase-guessing element to its algorithms. If you type a few words in, and those words are commonly found hanging together in its index, it will assume that you're searching for them as a phrase even if you don't put quotes around them. If you're looking for a phrase that is not common, though, you'll need the quotes. The ability to search for phrases can be surprisingly useful. Do you suspect that something your student turned in was plagiarized, or at least heavily borrowed without attribution? Type in a phrase or two from the paper and see if it turns up elsewhere! You can also check to see if your own work is being copied without your permission.

Query # Matches San Diego "San Diego" merits of laziness "merits of laziness" Another use for this feature: stamping out urban legends. Next time you get an e-mail warning you about a repressive new law about to pass or a vicious computer virus about to attack, check it out before passing on misinformation to others.

Lowered AltaVista pays attention to any capital letters you type into a query. If you search for Octopus, it will only find documents in which it's spelled that way. In general, unless you're after a particular spelling, use all lower case. Try these:

Query # Matches Octopus octopus WebQuest webquest webquest*

Lincoln's Suppose you found the absolutely perfect page about life in Ancient Egypt, and it's located at http://touregypt.net/Antiq.htm. You suspect that any other web pages out there that contain a link to that page would also contain things that would interest your students. If you put all or part of the URL of the page after "link:", you'll get a list of pages that are linked to the one you found useful.

Query # Matches link:http://www.clpgh.org/cmnh/tours/egypt/walton.html link:edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/webquest.html Try these and see how many other pages are linked to the Ancient Egypt page and to the WebQuest Page. (In fact, because Altavista has indexed the page you're reading now, you'll see it among the Egypt links as well.)