Lesson 9:  Field Searching

Return to Library's Home Page    Return to District's Home Page

Field searching was something that was totally new to me until I completed the tutorial.  I had no idea that electronic records were organized into separate fields, the way print records are.  A typical website is usually made up of some basic fields:  title, domain, host, URL, and link.  Some engines will let the user search for information in each of these fields.  By searching fields, the user is able to tell the search engine exactly which part of the document to look in. 

Running a title search involves exactly what the name implies.  When you run a title search you are telling the search engine to find documents that contain your search terms in their title. 

Example:  title:  "usc beaufort library"

Domain searching involves telling the search engine to limit your field searches to one of the top level domains. (see the lesson on evaluating webpages) 

Example:  domain:gov AND Afghanistan AND invasion AND U.S.  limits your search to government sites dealing with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. 

URL searching involves telling the search engine to look through URLs for a specific file that is part of the host site's URL. 

Example:  url:bck2skol will give you a list of all sites where the filename, bck2skol is included in the URL.

Image searching is very cool--if you want to find a certain image on the web, all you have to do is specify the image by name--this works well if the name is part of the image file name.  If not, this kind of search won't work.

Example:  IMAGE:cats.jpg will return images of cats that are saved as jpgs and have the word "cat" in their file name.

My assignment for this lesson involved using one of the examples from the tutorial and trying it on the "advanced" search page of Google. 

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