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Thomas
F. Saffell Library
For library information or services, phone 620-276-9511,
fax 620-276-9630, or email mailto:library@gcccks.edu
Take a little time to think about what you are trying to find. What is the point you will make with the information you want to find? Could you clearly explain to someone else -- 1)your point and 2)what you are searching for? What words and phrases do you think will be used in the titles and lead paragraphs of articles that contain the information you seek? What general subject would the information be filed under in an encyclopedia? In a textbook? Have you used a good dictionary to check spelling and definitions for your search words? Does the dictionary entry suggest additional words you could use?
Your research may lead you to rephrase or even change the point you are making and the kinds of information you seek. But you won't know that until you begin searching with your fist try at stating your point and projecting some of the wording you expect to find in articles, web pages, etc.
GCCC Suggestions Defining a Search and Selecting Search Terms
After you have defined your goal for a search and listed words to search, choose the places you need to search and the priority you give each of them. If some of your required sources of information are magazine articles and books, Google and Yahoo won't do the job. Nevertheless, the natural tendency to search the Web first because it is easy is not necessarily a bad thing. If some of your sources can be Web pages, you would search the Web at some point anyway. Doing the Web first can often help you test your initial list of search words and find additional search words. Even if you are allowed to use all Web sources for your project, you should choose to use books and articles also if your project is of much importance to you -- or to your grade.
GCCC Advice on Using the Web for Research
GCCC Suggestions GENERAL REFERENCE
GCCC Suggestions about how to search for articles and books may be found at HOW TO USE THE LIBRARY FOR RESEARCH ASSIGNMENTS
At this point your have: 1) defined the point you want to make with the information you seek; 2) projected roughly what you expect Web pages or articles you seek to say; 3) made a list of words and phrases for which you have checked the correct spelling and definitions; 4) selected the Web, or a database of magazine articles, or a library book catalog to search. For example, if you have selected the Web, the GCCC library recommends using Google first. Many of the basic searching ideas that help you use Google can be generalized to methods for searching article indexes and book catalogs.
First, be aware that Google (like all computer based searching tools) makes a lot of assumptions about what rules will work best with what you type into the blank(s) -- some of these rules can be changed by the user and others cannot. The first thing you see at http://www.google.com is a single blank with no "help" button on the screen. When you perform a search the results screen includes the search results and some new buttons, including "Search Tips." If "Search Tips" is selected, that screen has a button toward the top for "Basics of Search" which, when selected, displays a brief description of how Google performs a search on the words you type -- this screen may also be seen by going to http://www.google.com/help/basics.html.
Consider these search examples for Google, based on searches performed 10/14/03. Assume you want information about using pets as therapy -- for example, for sick children or for nursing home residents.
| Entered in Search Box | Results | Comment |
| dogs cats therapy | 138,000 hits. The first result is about therapy for pets, the second is about using pet as therapy for people. | First point: search engines can't tell the difference
between subjects and objects -- whether the therapy is done on the dog
or whether the dog is doing therapy for a person. Second point: Google finds only results that mention both dogs and cats - not either one or the other or both. Third point: Google finds only results that include the exact word "dogs" while ignoring related words such as the word "dog." |
| dog OR dogs cat OR cats therapy | 270,000 hits. The first result is the same as immediately above, but the second is different. | First point: Searching for either the singular or plural
form gets more results because some pages only use one form or the
other, not both. Google does not automatically look for the plural. The
GCCC library catalog does not generate plurals automatically, but it
does recognize wild card characters -- you may type dog? and the GCCC
catalog will search dog both with and without the ending s. (Google does
not recognize wild card characters.) Second point: the "OR" in the search is not a search word, it is a command. Google searches for a word in the search box whether any or all of the letters are capitals or lower case. The upper case "OR" is interpreted as an operator that combines results for dog and separate results for dogs all in one results list. Third point: Google has a somewhat unusual operation that will look for several synonyms of a search word automatically -- to do this add a tilde before the word -- ie. ~dog. |
| "dogs cats therapy" | 2 hits. Results are pages that had lists. | First point: the quotation marks bind the search words
together so that only pages that somewhere have all three words in that
exact order are in the results. Remember that if there are no quotation
marks around the words there are 138,000 hits because the words can be
anywhere and in any order in the documents that are retrieved. Second point: some important databases automatically bind your search words together in phrases as if they had quotation marks around them -- the GCCC Library catalog and INFOTRAC always do it. When you use them you must type AND (all capitals) between all words if want the same kind of results Google gave in the first example above. See Library Research for an explanation of how all this works. |
| "to be or not to be" | 95,600 hits. Without quotation marks results are 569,000,000 with no references to the quotation in most of them. | Point: in the previous example you would not want to bind the search words together because they are a list and are meaningless as a phrase. In this example you would not want all results that contain all these common words, but only those with the phrase in order. |
Are the results you get relevant? If not, why not?
Updated. 10/15/03