Search Engine Basics

What's the difference between Hope College and "Hope College"? About 1.8 million hits if you use the Excite search engine. Search engines are wonderful contraptions. They enable you to find information about specific topics among the hundreds of millions of web pages that have been created in the past few years. Without search engines, finding anything on the web would be next to impossible. However, there are some things to keep in mind about search engines. First, NONE of the current search engines (and there are dozens of them) search the entire web. The best ones search about half of the available web pages. Yahoo, while technically not a search engine, is one of the most popular ways of navigating through the web. Many people do not realize that it includes less than one half of one percent of what's out there. The second thing to keep in mind about search engines is that they do not all work alike. Fortunately, many of the major search engines are beginning to share some of the same search features.

Look at the Hope College example above. Most search engines do not recognize phrases unless you put them in quotes. Without quotes, Excite looked for Hope College, and it looked for the word Hope, and it looked for the word College. Excite then answered that it found 1.8 million records with one or both of those words in them. Putting quotes around the words resulted in about 2,700 hits, all of which contain the phrase Hope College.

Sometimes you may want to combine several terms to narrow down your results. In most search engines, it is not enough to simply type in the terms you want. Even though it may be pretty obvious to you that the computer should look for all of the terms (after all, why else would you have bothered to type them in?), it is not at all obvious to the computer. Putting a plus sign (+) in front of each term is how to tell the computer you really want that term to be included in your results. If you don't believe it, try searching for pages that mention Hope College football. If you search for "Hope College" and football, you get nearly 1 million hits. If you try +"Hope College" +football, you get 120.

Every search engine has its own little quirks and ways of searching. The best thing you can do is spend some time going through the help screens before you start searching. Spending 15 minutes doing that will very likely save you hours of frustration later on. The Library's www page has links to seven search engines and their help screens. Give them a try, decide which two or three you like best, learn how to use them effectively, then start surfing.

July 20, 2001