Lesson 6: Creating a Search Strategy
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This lesson started out by explaining the importance of asking yourself a few questions before beginning any search. These questions deal with what you're planning to do. If you're just going to browse to see what's out there on your topic, the best thing to do would be to start with a subject directory and then go to a metasearch engine. If you're looking for something specific, go to a big search engine like Google, or to a specialized database. If you want to find as much information as possible on a subject, try the same search in lots of different places.
It's important to understand that different search tools have different defaults for entering search inquiry information. If you type in a search term that has more than one word, but don't include any other marks or symbols, the search engine is set to to automatically add either the AND or the OR conjunction to link your terms together. (Don't freak out if you're confused--this will be better explained in lesson 7)
There are a multitude of other reasons that searches can go awry, ranging from varying relevance ranking systems to the search engine leaving out some of your words in its search. The key here is to keep trying till you get the results you're looking for.
One thing I learned in this lesson that was new for me was about "stop" words. Stop words are words that many search engines don't include in their search. These are usually small and common words like adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions. Some search engines will recognize stop words if they are surrounded by quotation marks.
I learned several important things about creating search statements. Some of them included:
The assignment for this lesson involved my assuming I was about to start looking for work and needed to write a cover letter. I was to go to Google and use the following search strings, and determine which seemed to be the most productive:
I felt the best search resulted from the third choice, because it included the word "templates."
Lesson 1 Search Engines Lesson 2 Metasearch Engines Lesson 3 Subdirectories Lesson 4 Library Gateways
Lesson 5 Evaluating WebPages Lesson 6 Creating a Search Strategy Lesson 7 Basic Search Tips
Lesson 8 Boolean Logic Lesson 9 Field Searching Lesson 10 Troubleshooting Lesson 11 Clusty Search Engine
Chapter 12 All Things Google Lesson 13 All Things Yahoo