Do you know how to systematically search the web? (21/23)

To systematically search the web there are certain steps that can be followed to get the best results possible. Commonly a systematic search comprises six steps:

1) Select a search engine:

Before starting to search e.g. for terminology, context examples or collocations, it is important to determine the type of search to be carried out in order to know what search engine to use. If, for example, you want to check the existence of a specific collocation you would use an index search engine like Google or Yahoo! Search where you just type in the collocation to be checked. If, on the hand, you want to search for a specific term in the field of medicine you might prefer to use a directory search or a specialised database like Medline. It is also important to consider what type of resource or document you want to search since some search engines offer special options to search for images, videos, etc.

2) Formulate your query

To formulate a query you have to enter a search phrase consisting of one or more keywords into the engine's search field. Usually, search engines offer many advanced functions (see question 22) which allow modifying and refining search results. These functions differ from one search engine to another so it is worth to have a look at the search engine’s documentation. The standard set of advanced functions comprises e.g. Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), restriction of a search to a specific language or domain.

3) Select hits

Sometimes, search engines return millions of results (hits), but before start clicking them it is recommended to read the hit’s description, since it often already contains the answer to your query. The hits’ descriptions consist of several elements, such as: title (usually the title of the web page which represents a clickable hyperlink that redirects you to the web page); description (often the search term and its surrounding context); URL (information on country and domain to which the page belongs, helps you to judge quality and relevance of a web page).

Some search engines offer additional information such as date (date of creation or last modification of a web page, helps you to determine how current a web page is); size (size of the page, e.g. helps to decide whether to include a web page in a text corpus or not); ranking (relevance rating of the hit: the higher the rating, the closer the page or document is related to the search term); language (language of the page).

4) Expand or restrict the query

In order to refine or restrict a search that returned too many results or in order to expand a search that did return too few results you can do the following:

For example, in order to restrict your search, you can: consider carefully the keywords to be used for the search (they should be as precise as possible); be careful with the spelling of words (some search engines are "case sensitive"); pay attention to the order in which you enter your keywords; use quotation marks ("") if you want to search for several words and in a specific order e.g. a collocation; or use Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT, etc.

If on the contrary you want to expand your search, because, for example, you have restricted it to one domain (e.g. .es for Spanish web pages), you can widen the search scope by including other domains that might contain Spanish texts (e.g. .ve, .co, .ar, .mx for Latin America or .com for commercial web sites). Another way of expanding a search is by reducing the number of keywords, by shortening phrases or by using e.g. placeholders or wildcards.

5) Check quality

Before using the documents retrieved in the search results, check whether the information is reliable and valid. There are some hints to do this, such as for example to verify if the term you searched is used in other sources or sites in the same context, if the context is correct, if the author or URL of the site is authoritative (specialist in the field), if the quality of the web page’s language is good enough, if the search term e.g. a collocation is used often enough (frequency criterion), etc. When searching terminology it is particularly important to be careful with taking terminology from translated web pages or web pages not written by native speakers. Usually, translated pages can be recognized by the URL (domain or country name). Sometimes you also find information about the author of a web page.

6) Bookmark results

Once you have verified the reliability of a result’s page, you can bookmark it or store it, so that you can access it later (see question 19 or have a look at the flash animation).

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