At beginning of class
- Yahoo update
- Business-topic term project
Slides from class
Slides
My notes on the chapter
- Unique words and phrases are a key to narrowing your search
- They can be used to focus in on more specialized pages that would use those terms
- Use means queries
- Gather related words using summaries
- Use search engines to find related words
- Ask search summaries
- “Related terms” recommended by Google
- Yahoo Directory can point in the right direction
- Different forms of Google queries gets you deep into the appropriate literature quickly
- Take advantage of the work of others
- Groups
- Mailing lists
- Links and directories that others have put together
- And, of course, blogs.
Sample searches
Use “means” and “definition” queries: Hydrocephalus
Related words: Investment guidance
Groups & mailing lists: Behavioral finance
Directories & glossaries: Behavioral finance
Links, directories, resources, and what’s new: Investment guidance
Searching blogs: behavioral finance
Fun with quotes
Exercises
- Sign in to Google.
- Change the preferences under Google Search so that it returned 50 documents instead of 10.
- Understanding and finding unique language for your searches: Search for information about behavioral finance.
- Start with just those two words
- Join them within quotes
- Now look through the summaries of the first 10-30 documents that are returned. See what concepts, terms, words you might add to the query in order to make the documents that are returned “meatier”. Go ahead and add them and look again at the results.
- Are there pages that are descriptions of books mixed in with your results? Get rid of them. There are probably a couple of ways that you might try.
- Get just the URLs that are housed at educational institutions.
- Look at Google Scholar and see what pages are returned.
- Find some glossaries of business terms.
- Search for your personal topic on the following:
- Mailing lists
- Google Groups
- Yahoo Groups
- Use Google to find specialty resources (links, directory, resources, what’s new—that type of stuff) related to your personal topic.
- Find business dictionaries and glossaries at
- The Glossarist
- Google Directory Listing of Dictionaries
- Any of the other glossary or dictionary listings
- Searching blogs for information about your personal topic
- At Technorati, search for your terms, and then play with the “with authority” settings on the right side.
- At Google Blog Search
- At Bloglines, do a “Search for posts” but also notice that a “Search for Feeds” is conducted at the same time (results on the right)
Possible blog topics
These are possible, not required, blog topics.
- Did you find any useful information in the mailing lists or groups? How could you use this information?
- Did you find any useful information in blogs? Did it refer you to any resources that you hadn’t found otherwise (books, articles, other blogs, web sites)? Did the “authority” setting at Technorati help?
- Which of the three above blog search sites found the most sites or posts? Which one found the most useful sites or posts? Was there much overlap? (This last question is very important.)
Resources
Student Notes
Web Search Principles #1 (September 26, 2007)
- Announcement by Elad Hilman regarding terms projects
- Get guidance and input from professionals and work with local businesses for your term projects.
- If interested, you should sign up under Assignments > Term Project Topics > Company Term Project.
- E-mail Elad directly if you have any questions at hilmane@umich.edu.
- Remember that doing this could look good for interviews and resumes; the fact that you are working with companies beyond school work looks impressive.
Search technology is rapidly changing with new features and add-ins being modified to the sites we use everyday. Yet because we are searching for information frequently, we must adapt to these changing sites. So how do you use search? Specifically, how do you use Yahoo! and Google more effectively in order to get exactly what you are looking for?
Specialized terms
- Searching with Ask.com: Today, we searched for hydrocephalus. Notice how Ask.com tries to help out by displaying additional terms you could use to narrow your search. What if you wanted to do this yourself?
- In “Google”:http://www.google.com, search hydrocephalus means, and you’ll return results with articles including ‘means,’ ‘means,’ or ‘meaning.’
- Put that same exact phrase in quotations (“hydrocephalus means”), and the search results will only display results with articles than include those exact phrases next to each other.
- Perhaps you are looking for a definition. Try using the ‘intitle:’ term and the OR function
- intitle:hydrocephalus (intitle:means OR intitle:definition)
- Be care with queries like statistical means because means is a statistical term (as is mean). In this case, put means in quotations (“means”) for a possible definition result.
Related words
- Remember than the summaries Google produces for each web page are helpful as well.
- When running a generalized search, see which articles are produced first and read the summaries to get a better idea of what keywords to include in your query for your next search.
Take advantage of work other’s have done
- Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups
- Basically members within groups are exchanging information through bulletin boards
- Generally speaking, the higher the number of members, the more legitimate the group is for a general topic such as finance or investments.
- Remember that Google purchased Usenet (an application that served the purpose of a modern-day internet bulletin board) and archived over 800 million messages since 1979 to better match your queries. This is why Google will have more groups than other sites.
- Mailing lists
- The Mail Archive
- In the Mail Archive, every message that gets exchanged within mailing lists gets archived on this database. Just another tool to consider when conducting searches.
- An assembly of links
- From independent users who gather useful links and put them on their website…
- to DMOZ, the open directory project, that collects what they consider high quality links (great for academic purposes)
- Using “Links”, “Directories”, “Resources”, and “What’s New” in Queries
- Use “links”, “directories”, “resources”, and “what’s new” to narrow down the search (e.g., topic links, “topic” links, intitle:“topic” links, intitle:“topic” (links OR directories OR resources OR what’s new)).
- Blogs, refining your searchs
- We searched ‘behavioral finance’ at Technorati
- Remember to refine your search by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting “a lot of authority” (otherwise, you can get searches from people who want your clicks)
- … at Bloglines
- Your query may produce results with the description or title under ‘Matching feeds’ that relates to your search
- Also, remember to sort by relevance (this includes Google Blog Search as well, sorting your results by publish time)
Student notes by: Talun Zeitoun at 07:37 PM (09/26)