Chapter 5 : Searching The Web Flashcards
Current awareness
Keeping a user up-to-date with the latest information on a specific topic or area of interest.
Default Boolean operator
If a Boolean operator is not specified in a search query, the search engine will insert the default for that specific engine which is usually AND
Directory
Lists of names of people living in a particular area, organisations operating in a particular field or individuals in a particular profession.
Filtering
Narrowing your search by specifying fields in which the search term should appear.
Google scholar
A search engine that specialises in scholarly literature.
Internet
A network of computer networks that operates worldwide using a common set of communication protocols. The internet is the broad name given to several communication
technologies used on the worldwide network, for example email, chat rooms and the world wide web (Www).
Limits
Narrowing your search by limiting the fields in which the search term should appear. (See Filtering.)
Metasite
Sites about sites. Metasites build databases of search engines and databases of databases
Multimedia search engine
A search engine that specialises in non-text information, for example graphics (pictures) and sound clips
News search engine
A search engine with a fast rate of update, specifically suited to news items.
Peer reviewing
The review of an article by experts in the field. This process is usually employed to decide whether an article will be accepted for publication in an academic journal.
Profile
Used in current awareness and alerting services to create a query that is run periodically in order to supply the user with the latest information on a chosen topic or area of
interest.
Search engine
computer program that gathers and indexes documents, and then searches a database and retrieves documents based on a match with the query.
World Wide Web (www)
The world wide web (www) is the part of the internet that is accessible through a browser.
A search engine consists of 4 parts that work together to bring results to the user interface :
Spider or crawler
Index
Interface
Query manager.
Spider of crawler
A program called a spider or crawler starts with a list of URLs and visits these sites to gather information. This is also called harvesting’. If there are hyperlinks on these
pages, the spider will follow these too, and from there the spider moves through the web by following all the links it encounters. This means that if there are pages that do not
contain any links to it, they will not be indexed and you will not be able to find those pages through a search engine.
Index
All the pages that were visited (or harvested) by the spider are now indexed at the search engine site. This means that the words in the text of the original page are listed in
a database with a pointer to where this information can be found. Every single occurrence of the word has an address linked to it so that the search engine can find that
specific word again on the website where it originally appeared. Depending on the search engine, either the entire text (full text) is indexed or only parts of the text are
indexed, for example, the title and main headings. Once the database is built, the search engine robots must revisit the pages they have already crawled and indexed to
ensure that, if the page has changed since the last crawl, the new information is updated in the database.
Interface
The interface displays the search results, which are usually ranked according to relevance or how closely they match your search query. This is the only part of the search
engine that the user actually sees.
Query manager
The query manager matches search terms and other instructions, including Boolean operators (also known as logical operators), with the database index. As discussed in
Chapter 4, developments in natural language searching have changed the face of search engines like Google. Semantic networks, and innovations like RankBrain and
Knowledge Graph, match not only the actual words in the query, but also terms that are semantically and contextually related to these terms. Most search engines support
Boolean queries, and a number of them support queries in natural language. It is important to know the kind of queries different search engines support so that you can use
them to your best advantage.
The simple search interfaces of the three main search engines :
Google
Bing
Yahoo!
Examples of news search engines
Google News
Yahoo! News
Bing News
Standard image search
To conduct a standard image search, type the word or words into the search bar that describe what you are looking for and select the ‘images’ option, as illustrated by Figure 5.9
Reverse image search
Reverse image searching is when you use an existing image to find the same image or similar images on the Internet
To perform a reverse image search you first select the camera icon in the Google Images search bar. You will then be given the options to drag an image’ into the search interface, paste an image URL’
into the search interface, or Upload an image’ from your personal device. The Google search will retrieve exact matches of the given image as well as matches that are similar to the shape of the object,
the colour of the object and the colour of the background.
The following slideshow illustrates the process of doing a reverse image search.
Findsounds
Findsounds is one of the search engines you can use to describe a sound in order to find a match. In addition to the keywords, you can also specify the format of the sound file.
It is also possible to use an existing sound to find a match. This is called reverse audio searching. Shazam is a music identification service that matches a sample of music recorded by a mobile device
against a music database and returns information about that sample, such as the song title, artist, album and date of recording. Shazam claims to be the top way to identify music and TV and you can
use it to find the title of any song or more about the programme you’re watching in seconds. You touch Shazam to start the search process.
Shazam
Shazam is a music identification service that matches a sample of music recorded by a mobile device
against a music database and returns information about that sample, such as the song title, artist, album and date of recording. Shazam claims to be the top way to identify music and TV and you can
use it to find the title of any song or more about the programme you’re watching in seconds. You touch Shazam to start the search process.
Virtual assistants
Apple Siri is part of the operating system of Apple mobile devices (is). Read more about Apple Siri here.
Alexa was developed by Amazon and released in 2014. Alexa has a number of pre-set functions, for example local weather, news and timers.
Google Assistant was released in 2016. It has the capability to engage in two-way conversations with the user.
General directories and metasites
General directories were the most important way of organising and finding information on the world wide web (www) before search engines were developed. There are very few general directories
that are still actively updated. Best of the Web is a mixture of a business directory and a general directory with links to information about specific topics
Use Best of the Web to find information about acupuncture. Hint: Look under the subcategory, Health. What can you observe?
Metasites are directories of directories, search engines and databases. They are sites about sites. Metasites do not build databases that contain information. Instead, they build databases of search
engines and databases of databases by topic and region.
Geographical directories
Geographical directories cover information that relates to a specific geographical region or country, or even a particular city.
Subject directories
Subject directories deal with specific subjects or topics, for example education, science or history. Some of the subject directories are even more specific and, for example deal with only computer
software downloads.
Directories limited to a specific language
These directories categorise websites in a particular language. Some examples are:
German
French
Directories dealing with specific activities
The most well-known directories of this type are shopping directories. Shopping directories are similar to walking around in a department store - items are categorised by type to make browsing and
comparison easier. One example of a shopping directory that many people are aware of is Amazon. Visit the Amazon homepage, to see the list of shopping categories available in this directory. To
see the directory, select the Shop by Category’ section on the homepage. The directory is visible on the left-hand side on of the screen as a list.
