13. Menu based Web searching

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If you discuss advanced Internet searching with search engine officials, they will probably tell you that most searchers are not interested in learning true Boolean searching, and that they prefer menu based search options. This may be so, but then again most searchers do not know what they are missing.

We find menu based search facilities to be more confusing than Boolean searching, and they are not as flexible when it comes to building more complex queries. That being said, menu based pages for advanced searching may be quite efficient, as soon as you get a grip on how they work.

(If you do not know a search form from a web address field or a pull down menu from a radio button, please read the absolute beginners text box below first.)

A menu based search page will include one (or more) search forms where you enter your search query. The simplest versions will give you one form to enter all your keywords, and a pull down menu that gives various options regarding how these keywords are to be treated by the search engine.

Normally these options are:

• All these words, meaning that the search engine is to fetch pages that have all these words on them (equals Boolean AND or +)
• Any words or One of these words, meaning that the search engine is to fetch pages that have at least one of these words, but not necessarily all, on them (equals Boolean OR)
• This exact phrase, meaning that the search engine is to find pages that include these words in this particular order. When using Boolean searching or search engine math you would enclose the words in double quotation marks (“-“)

This type of pull down menus do not give you the opportunity to exclude words (Boolean AND NOT). However, there are some search engines that let you distribute your search terms over several search fields, where each of them has its own pull down menu with options signifying whether this word or these words

• have to be included on the page (Boolean AND)
• may be included on the page (Boolean OR)
• must not be included on the page (Boolean AND NOT)

See for instance Google's advanced search page.

By filling in all the fields you can actually build quite complex queries.

It helps to picture each of these forms as separate filters or sieves, one put beneath the other, and each of them filtering out and discarding a certain number of web pages. The search engine pours in all the web pages available and sorts out the pages you do not need on the basis of these filters.

For instance, if you tell the search engine that the pages that are to be fetched have to include the word “agriculture”, it will normally filter out all pages that do not include this word (Google makes exceptions to this rule, but that should not concern us here).

Most menu based pages for advanced searching also provides other types of filters, predominantly for various forms of “field searching”. For instance, you may limit the search to Web pages that have been made within a certain time period, i.e. you ask the search engine to filter out pages that do not belong to this period.

You may also select pages written in a particular language, thus excluding all other languages, or you may look for pages belonging to a certain site (pandia.com) or a certain type of domain (for instance .edu for American educational sites or .no for Norwegian sites), thus sorting out all pages that do not belong to this site or domain.

Each “filter” you apply will narrow down your search and return fewer results. You will normally have to experiment to get the optimal results – too many filters and you end up sorting out useful and relevant pages, too few and you end up with too many hits.

An example of a menu search form.

Here is a version of the Pandia Powersearch Metasearch Engine that may serve as an example of a menu based search form. It combines the use of pull down menus with radio buttons.

The first pull down menu (marked The Entire Web) can be used to select what kind of files you are looking for ("Entire Web" for regular Web pages, "MP3" for music files etc.).

There are also options for limiting the search to pages from a particular country. This applies only to regular searches for Web pages and will limit results to URLs that ends with that nation's national domain (e.g. .no for Norway). Please note, however, that many sites have domain names ending in .com, .org., .net, even if they are not American.

The language option will filter out pages written in the language you are looking for, regardless of domain.

Using this form you click on radio buttons (the small circles) to select search terms ("All Words" = AND, "Any Word" = OR, "Exact phrase" = ah, well, "Exact phrase") and the length of the site description given on the result pages.

Then there is a separate pull down menu you can use to choose how many results the search engine is to present per page.