Without Impunity - Find It! - Search Engine Tips


Index \| E-mail \| Resources		June 1998 V.I No.1

Find It! - Search Engine Tips

Finding human rights information on the Internet can be a frustrating experience if you don’t know how to use the many tools available to find the diamonds in the rough. Remember that although the Internet consists of the World Wide Web, newsgroups, gopher sites, electronic mail, and chat, most information is found on the web, followed by newsgroups and gopher sites.
Many web sites such as Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, and Altavista have attempted to catalog or index the content of the Internet in such a way that you can easily find information. In order to make effective use of these sites, you must understand how these search engines, as they are commonly referred to, organize the information that they collect. All of these search engines are free and can be used by anybody with access to Netscape Navigator, Opera, or Internet Explorer. To use them, click on the empty white box, usually located near the center of the screen and next to a button that says “GO,” “Search,” “Find,” “Seek,” or some similar word. Note that this is not the same place you would use to type in a web address such as “http://www.derechos.org.” Once you click on the empty box, a blinking cursor will appear and you can type in the words that you are searching for.
Yahoo is unique in that it is hierarchically-organized and categorized by people. It was the first of this type and it is the most extensive. When you conduct a search in Yahoo, the only text that is searched is the name of the site and a brief sentence or two that describes the site. Yahoo excels at finding sites devoted to specific subjects. For example, if you wanted just to find web sites devoted to human rights, Yahoo would be a good place to start. First, the category for human rights would be displayed and you could clik on that and display all the sites that are categorized in human rights. Then it would list individual sites where both of the words human and rights appeared. A search engine like AltaVista or HotBot would return thousands of pages in an order that would be difficult to make any sense of.
Since Yahoo has had such success, other search engines like InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot have emulated Yahoo with their own heirachical category listings. Don’t be fooled. Yahoo has more and better listings.
All of the other search engines use automated software to retrieve web pages, index them, and then allow you to search through the index of web pages. So instead of categorizing the web site (or collection of pages), these search engines concentrate on the text that appears on each individual page. When you type in your search, the search engine uses some sort of formula to determine which pages are most relevant to your search. Generally these formulas are based on how many times your search terms appear on the page or how near the top of the page they occur. Sometimes this results in very strange results, so it’s best to use as many words relevant to your search as possible. These search engines are best used when searching for very specific information. For example, if you were searching for information about human rights violations in the town of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, one of these search engines might be very useful. Whereas if you want general information about human rights in Guatemala, these search engines would probably be less useful.
Most search engines use Boolean operators to help make a search more specific. The operators (AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses) can be used to tailor a search and make the search results much more relevant to what you are looking for. The search term “HUMAN RIGHTS IN BOLIVIA” can be changed to “HUMAN AND RIGHTS AND BOLIVIA” to narrow down a search. Some search engines use similar operators to help you narrow down a search. The search engines AltaVista and Infoseek use the symbol “+” to indicate that a particular search term must appear on a page and “-” to indicate that a search term must not appear on the page. Quotes are used for phrases and are useful when searching for people’s names. Note that some names may be alphabetized by last name. So if one wanted to search for information about Alexander Lukashenko and human rights using AltaVista or InfoSeek, you would type in +”Alexander Lukashenko” +”human rights” +Belarus. You may also want to try using Lukashenko by itself as his name may not always appear as “Alexander Lukashenko.” Remember to be careful with upper and lower case. Search engines like Altavista and Infoseek ignore case if everything is typed in lower case but will match the case if anything is typed in upper case.
Although there are web sites such as Metacrawler, Savvy Search, Dogpile, and Search.com where you can use many search engines at once, I would caution against great use of these. Although the results can be interesting, they rarely take advantage of the powerful features available in each individual search engine and generally rely on a lowest-common denominator of features. Each search engine usually has a “Help” or “tips” button close to the search box and I highly recommend taking a look at it. Using some of the more advanced features of some search engines, you can restrict your search to government web sites, search for images, sounds, and even pages that link to a particular web site.
Search engines have their limits, however. First, they are updated every few weeks or months, so you may end with dead links - links that go nowehere. Second, the search engine may not index all of the available web pages at a given site. For a while, one of the search engines would index more than 600 pages at a single site. Most importantly, they are not able to index databases that many web sites now use. For example, the United Nations web site has databases of very useful documents that you will never find using search engines. Instead, you will have to go to the UN web site and use its search function, which may be quite different than the ones used by search engines.
Your best results may not come from a search engine at all, but from finding one good web site that is useful. Most web sites have a list of links to other related sites. So if you find one great site on freedom of expression in Asia, chances are good that it will have a list of links to other good sites on freedom of expression in Asia.
Many of the search engines can also be used to search through postings on newsgroups. Dejanews is the king of all newsgroup search engines. It can be quite useful because human rights news and actions are often posted to newsgroups like misc.activism.progressive and the relevant soc.culture groups.
The best strategy I have found for using search engines is to use as many words relevant to the search as possible. Then group as many as possible into phrases. If this fails, then rethink your search. Are there other words that are more likely to be used? For example, mailing list, discussion list, email list, and list may all refer to the same thing, but a search for each term will get you very different results. Perhaps adding the search term majordomo or listserv will enhance your search results (majordomo and listserv are the names of software used to run mailing lists and are often in the email address used to subscribe to the list). If you still don’t get any search results, broaden the search by eliminating a word or two.
Using the web to search for information only gets easier with practice. And don’t forget to use all of the tools available at your disposal - especially the “Help” button!