Making Sense of Library Research

When using the Internet, keep in mind the following:

• 31.9 percent failure rate among business users when researching topics using the major search engines. (Outsell, 2006)


• A separate study from Convera shows that professionals in virtually every industry are having trouble finding important work-related information on the major search engines. (from The Trouble with Search Engines)
  
  
• “A higher percentage of Internet users reported negative views about the reliability and accuracy of information provided by search engines, such as Google. Slightly over half of Internet users — 51 percent — said that most or all of the information produced by search engines is reliable and accurate — down from the 62 percent who reported the same response in 2006.” (from SearchEngineLand)

• Did you know that Google has not indexed the entire Internet? The overlap between the three major search engines is much lower than you think. To be a good researcher, you must still use Yahoo and Microsoft Live. ". . .the percent of total results unique to only one of the four Web search engines was 84.9%, shared by two of the three Web search engines was 11.4%, shared by three of the Web search engines was 2.6%, and shared by all four Web search engines was 1.1%. This small degree of overlap shows the significant difference in the way major Web search engines retrieve and rank results in response to given queries. (Information Processing and Management, 2006. URL: http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~spinkah/eprints/IPM-OverlapStudy.pdf)
  
  This means that if you use the Internet for any type of research, then you need to search multiple databases. Sometimes, search engines like Dogpile can be helpful as they do simultaneous searching of multiple search engines.

Many of the tips below will work in a variety of databases. If you are not sure, then click the help page for that respective search engine.

1.     Place a phrase in double quotes to keep it together.

2.     Earlier, we discussed the term AND and its significance to database searching. AND does not work well with Internet search engines. You can instead use the "+" (plus) symbol to force the word to appear on your result list. If you do not use "+" your terms actually may or may not appear.

3.     Google-specific search ideas:

• Use the tilde ("~") to find related terms. For instance, a Google search "~recycling" would also include garbage and other similar terms.
• Simple mathematical conversions. A Google search would be phrased this way: 10.5 cm in inches.
• What time is it in Hong Kong? (On an aside, Google normally does not do natural questions very well.)

4.     Use more than one search engine. Did you know that 85% of first and second page hits on Google are unique to Google alone? (Source: Information Processing and Management, 2006) That means you need to replicate your search in other search engines.

Try using meta-engines instead. Meta-engines search multiple search engines simultaneously. Examples:

• Mahalo - not a true meta-engine; however, it does search the major three engines and present the results side-by-side in a tabbed-format.
• Dogpile
• Clusty

5.     Remember that Google's pages are ranked by popularity (how many times those pages have been clicked). It has nothing to do with relevancy. That is for you to determine.

6.     The same principle that is true with databases is true with the Internet. Use the most unique terms possible.

7.     If using the Internet, copy and paste the URL for future reference.

8.     Try limiting your search by domain; e.g., .EDU or .GOV.

9.     Compare items by stating "better than _____" or "reminds me of _____."

10.  10 US dollars in Australian money (currency conversion).

11.  You can use the Boolean OR (adds every term to your search) but it must be capitalized. Recommended if you need to broaden your search (not finding what you need).

12.  Google includes the tilde (see above), hyphen, apostrophe, and asterisk in a search query. (For more on truncation, go back to What If I Don't Find Many Useful Results)

13.  You can search number ranges if you use the ellipse (three periods in a row).

14.  Google allows you to define words (define thesaurus, for instance).

15. Have you tried some of the semantic search engines such as Hakia or Kartoo? Hakia has another separate cite called Credible Hakia. Search engines today use the global keyword method. If you type "dog cat" for your search, today's engines don't know that a poodle is a dog or a calico is a cat. Semantic engines try to correct this problem. These engines are still in the deveopment phase so remember they are not yet perfected.