Secrets of Searching

Are you always on the lookout for a great read? You may ask for a recommendation by a friend or acquaintance. But if you’d like to explore a wider range of choices or different perspectives, you may want to check out the resources available online – and there are many. We’ve taken some of the legwork out of your treasure hunt by identifying several excellent sites to help you find and evaluate books of any genre and subject for readers of all ages.A great place to start is the Saratoga Springs (New York) Public Library’s Websites for Readers. Here you’ll find links to booklists and reviews by The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly and The Washington Post.Additional online resources recommended by SSPL are

BookSpot, Readerville, BookPage, Salon, January Magazine and Literati. In addition to lists of books in special genres, SSPL offers links to other library databases where you can search for fiction (adult and young adult) series and sequels, resources for book discussion groups, and information on authors and literary criticism.Do you like to go for the gold? Many web sites feature books which have won various awards. BookWeb lists recipients of The American Book Awards, which recognize “the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing.” Salt Lake County (Utah) Library Services connects readers to a wide range of prizewinners in general fiction, mystery, romance, horror, science fiction and fantasy, and more. And American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association Booklists & Book Awards provides links to winners of Alex, Odyssey and other awards as well as special booklists for reluctant young adult readers and college-bound youth.Finally,

The Book Report Network brings together “a growing number of websites that provide original book content — author interviews, reviews and commentary — along with interactive elements such as polls, questions and contests.” Among the flagship site’s special features are genre-specific sections and a “Word of Mouth” area where readers can review and rate titles. Network affiliate sites include Authors on the Web, Teenreads, and Kidsreads.Bookmark the booklovers’ resources you like best, and you’ll find that a great read is always just a click away!

Polishing your online search technique will help you research more quickly. But concentrating too hard on the speed aspect of online research may cause you to miss critical information. Don’t let important facts get lost in the rush.

Greg R. Notess calls it “The Lost Obvious.”

In his book Teaching Web Search Skills (Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2006) 166, he says, “The second page of search results is a blind spot for far too many searchers. This obvious expansion of search results is lost to many users, and without it, they may miss a good deal of information.”

Notess explains, “Most search engines default to displaying 10 results and cluster their results to that only one or two records per Web site will be included in those first 10. Unfortunately, most users never look beyond the clustered top 10. Blame David Letterman and his Top 10 lists or blame the search engines for giving so few results by default…Gary Price considers results beyond the first 10 to be part of the invisible Web since so few users ever look that far.”

Searching beyond the initial results is simple: just click on the “next” button to see the second set of hits returned. He also suggests exploring the advanced search option “from which searchers can get up to 100 results” or personalization “which, like the advanced search, can allow up to 100 results to be set as the default.”

Another strategy is needed, Notess says, to find the third or fourth results. “Most search engines cluster the results and provide access to the other hits from the same site under a link labeled ‘More Results from’. Unfortunately, that link is usually at the bottom of the record and in a different (often lighter) color, so it mostly goes unseen.”

Skilled web searchers know that well-defined search terms provide the most targeted results and that one of the best — and fastest — ways to narrow the field is by searching for exact phrases.Your search engine may offer a “search by exact phrase” option. If not, simply put your phrase in double quotation marks. Living Internet provides these insights into how exact searches work and when to use them:

Because they are a form of unique identifier, phrases are very useful at filtering search results to just pages that contain that exact, specific string of characters.

The longer the phrase, the fewer and more relevant the results returned… until the phrase is so specific there are actually no pages that match. In the middle is the perfect search query.

Some of the very best phrases are full person names. While there may be many people named Winston, or Spencer, or Churchill, there is only one savior of liberal democracy named Winston Spencer Churchill. Therefore, if you search for that name as a phrase, you ensure that all pages returned contain that exact name:

“winston spencer churchill”You can also add phrases to existing searches. For example, the following search only returns pages that contain the word “biography” and the exact phrase “mozart was born”:

biography AND “mozart was born”You can combine several phrases with the and operator to make kind of a meta-phrase and greatly narrow the number of pages returned:

“sherlock holmes” AND “221 B, Baker Street”You can widen a search by looking for several phrases at once, by combining several phrases with the or operator in a separate term in brackets:

biography AND (“mozart was born” OR first learned” OR “when mozart was”)
“richard burton” AND ( “doctor livingstone, I presume” OR “dr. livingstone, I presume”)Song lyrics are great unique phrases, if you can get them right. You can either search for a long phrase if you know the whole thing, or several short phrases combined with AND:

“how many roads must a man walk down”
“anything goes” AND “glimpse of stocking” AND “good authors too”The best phrases are specific enough to get the pages you want, while filtering out pages you don’t want. At the same time, they should be common enough to actually be found. For example, the following phrase is too specific, because there isn’t any text on the Internet that contains that exact phrase:

“mozart was born at a very young age”

There are times when your online work is more fact-finding mission than comprehensive research. Whether you need to check out a detail for a huge project or you simply want a quick answer to a question, several reliable online reference tools can make short work of such tasks.Some search engines provide reference tools, says Tara Calishain in her book Web Search Garage (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 2005), 182. She points to Google, which offers dictionaries and a calculator that also handles conversions. “Google also has a ‘define’ syntax,” she says. “Enter define:keyword. When you do this…you’ll get definitions pulled from all over the Internet.” She notes that some of the results can be “kind of strange, but there’s usually something that provides you with a definition.”

RefDesk – http://www.refdesk.com/
RefDesk has been around for ages, and it’s still great. It contains over 20,000 links. When you visit the front page you may find yourself a bit overwhelmed. Have no fear; it’s simple. On the left you’ll see some search boxes for popular search tools (like Google) and links to site information and “Quick Find” for specific information types like jobs, economic facts, and obituaries. In the middle you’ll see daily features (x-of-the-day) as well as links to current event resources and, at the bottom of the page, RefDesk subject categories. Finally, on the right you’ll see lots of news links, “help and advice” links, and pointers to reference resources in popular categories like almanacs, biographies, etc.

ReferenceDesk – http://www.referencedesk.org/
ReferenceDesk is a lot less cluttered than RefDesk, but it doesn’t have all that cool stuff on the front page either! The front page is laid out more like a searchable subject index, with categories like Almanacs, Law and Legal, Quick Searches, and Biographies. On the left and right side of the category list, you’ll see a variety of link lists, including Quick Useful Links, Today in History, and even television listings.

LibrarySpot – http://www.libraryspot.com/
LibrarySpot is one of the Spot family of sites, and there’s plenty of good stuff here. This site is not so much about ready reference as it is about library-type information. Because of that, you’ll find some unusual features here, including asked questions, trivia, library listings, and a huge number of lists (top 100 movies, 2004 college rankings, etc.). Be sure to check out the pulldown menus at the top of the page, which will direct you to a number of reference tools as well as to library news, reference information, and more.

“When you need a variety of information at one time, or you’re not quite sure what you need, these all-in-one sites are great,” Calishain explains. “They point you to a ton of information at once, and for the most past they’re fast-loading and don’t clutter your surfing with pop-ups or a lot of unnecessary graphics.”

Have you ever tried to do an online search and gotten results that seemed to have nothing to do with your query? Search engine results are returned ranked by confidence or relevance, and different search engines can return different results on the same search. Understanding how search engines determine relevance can improve your odds of search success.According to The Spider’s Apprentice, a site maintained by Monash Information Services, search engines “list the hits according to how closely they think the results match the query.”

Most search engines use search term frequency as a primary way of determining whether a document is relevant. If you’re researching diabetes and the word “diabetes” appears multiple times in a Web document, it’s reasonable to assume that the document will contain useful information. Therefore, a document that repeats the word “diabetes” over and over is likely to turn up near the top of your list.

If your keyword is a common one, or if it has multiple other meanings, you could end up with a lot of irrelevant hits. And if your keyword is a subject about which you desire information, you don’t need to see it repeated over and over—it’s the information about that word that you’re interested in, not the word itself.

Some search engines consider both the frequency and the positioning of keywords to determine relevancy, reasoning that if the keywords appear early in the document, or in the headers, this increases the likelihood that the document is on target. For example, one method is to rank hits according to how many times your keywords appear and in which fields they appear (i.e., in headers, titles or plain text). Another method is to determine which documents are most frequently linked to other documents on the Web. The reasoning here is that if other folks consider certain pages important, you should, too.

If you use the advanced query form on AltaVista, you can assign relevance weights to your query terms before conducting a search. Although this takes some practice, it essentially allows you to have a stronger say in what results you will get back.

As far as the user is concerned, relevancy ranking is critical, and becomes more so as the sheer volume of information on the Web grows. Most of us don’t have the time to sift through scores of hits to determine which hyperlinks we should actually explore. The more clearly relevant the results are, the more we’re likely to value the search engine.

For more useful tips on improving search efficiency, visit The Spider’s Apprentice.