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Searching and Evaluating Websites

Author: Lindsey Dawson

How Search Works

Matt Cutts explains how Google handles queries and ranks results.

Source: Google - http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks

Searching "Firm" and "Soft" Terms

Firm Search Terms: Are likely to be on most pages that discuss your topic, and/or are described in a limited number of ways.

Soft Search Terms: Are less likely to appear consistently on pages about your topic, and/or can be expressed in so many different ways that is too difficult to come up with a good term or set of terms that are likely to find what you need.

Example:

A student is searching for a specific book with a Native American protagonist that also includes gun-runners, witchcraft, and hippies.

Native Americans is risky as a search term, because there are so many different ways to express that concept, depending on the author’s background, social context, and the time during which it was written. Possible related terms include Indian, Native Peoples, First Nations, tribe, and even a specific tribe name, like Navajo, which—besides being undefined by the asker, could have one of many spellings. So, Native Americans is here a soft search term, as likely derived from the asker’s context as from the words of the book’s author.

Firm terms: gun-runner AND witchcraft

Soft term: hippies

Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10nYxhi3YfaVYJDHsXWHouxRmRAlN6UKpCNslJ0DU55k/edit

Crafting a Search

Searching Tips

Looking for a specific phrase? Use QUOTATION MARKS.
- For examples, instead of typing in Nobel Prize Winners 2012, typing in "Nobel Prize Winners 2012" narrows my search down to that EXACT phrase.
Search within a specific site. site:URL "keyphrase"
- For example, if I wanted to find my name on the school website, I would type site:saintjohnsprep.org "Lindsey Dawson". The results will only show pages within the school's website.
Search a specific domain. site:.edu keyphrase
- For example, if I wanted to search for information on the American Romanticism only found of educational websites, I would type site:.edu american romanticism. The results will only show pages within the school's website.
Search using Boolean logic. AND, OR, NOT
- For example, Lindsey AND Marqus searches for all pages containing both terms anywhere on the page. Lindsey OR Marqus searches for all pages containing the term "Lindsey" and all pages containing the term "Marqus". Lindsey NOT Marqus searches for all pages containing the term "Lindsey" and excludes all pages that contain the term "Marqus."