SEARCH TIPS

Teaching searching to absolute beginners

We'll bring you a few beginners' search tips today. That doesn't mean that search engine veterans should skip this section, however. Quite the opposite, actually, as the search engine experts often serve as teachers for company and institution newcomers. Remember, nothing is self evident for a beginner, and the most elementary misunderstandings may stop a searcher from getting the best out of the Web.

Many newcomers to Internet searching get confused as to where to enter their search queries. There are so many forms and fields where you can enter text, and it's hard to know where to begin.

Countless company employees believe that the default home page that is opened when they open their Web browser (Explorer, Netscape or Opera) is the page all Web users see when they surf the Net. You could say that they are unable to differentiate between the browser as a program and the Web page as a content deliverer. That is actually not so surprising, given that both the browser tool bar and the webpages themselves are interactive, with buttons and links that brings you to other destinations around the world.

Nevertheless, it normally helps to compare the browser with a word processor or text editor like Word. In the same way that you can open any Word .doc file in Word, you can open any Web page in your browser. Tell the newcomer that while your text document is most likely saved on your own computer or the company server, the Web page can be localized on any Web server in the whole world. In this way the Web becomes the extension of your own computer. It is the world's largest hard drive, so to speak.

Unfortunately Microsoft has started blurring the lines between the Word word processor and the Explorer Web browsers. You may now open and edit Word documents in the Internet Explorer. This may be useful for those who know what they are doing, but from a didactic point of view it is a disaster. There is nothing we can do about that, but webmasters designing institutional intranets should be aware of the problem.

Some versions of the major browsers allow users to enter the names of some sites in the browser bar address field, i.e. the field just below the main browser buttons. This is even more confusing to the newcomer, as he or she may already find it hard to differentiate between this field and regular search fields. The solution is to suggest that people use the browser address field to enter URLs (i.e. Web addresses) only.

The extent of this problem is illustrated by the fact that many searchers use the search engine search fields to enter Web addresses. One of the most popular search queries for finding Pandia is -- believe it or not -- "www.pandia.com". This means that the searcher actually knows the address of our site, but that he or she is uncertain as to where to enter the URL.

Again: Tell them to enter the Web address in the field named "address" near the top of the browser window. After all, it is normally easy to find, as there is probably an address beginning with http:// there already. Tell them that the search fields you find at portals and search engines sites are for regular search queries only, i.e. for selected keywords that describe what you are searching for.

Another source for confusion is the number of windows. Not only is it hard to keep the browser apart from the rest of the screen content; many beginners are also not aware that the browser may contain more than one window.

At Pandia, for instance, we normally let links pointing to another site open in a new browser window. There are many reasons for this. We know, for instance, that searchers looking for search tools won't find what they are looking for at the first try. By keeping the Pandia Web page open, we make it easy for them to find back to the original Pandia resource page. All they have to do is to close the newly opened window.

Many newcomers, however, have not realized that there is a new window, hence they click on the "Back" button to get back to the starting point. However, the back button in the new window won't work, as it refers to content opened in that window only. They will have to close the newly opened window.

Again it is useful to compare the browser to a word processor. In the same way as you can have many letters open in Word at the same time, you may have several Web pages open in the browser at once.

This is useful also for other reasons. If you are working on a slow Internet connection or on a slow computer, the browser will need time to render the visited pages again when you hit the "Back" button. If you keep the Web page in a separate window in the background, it is already there for you to read.

Opening new windows is particularly useful when you are using search engines. When you go through a list of search results, there will be many results that does not bring you the information you are looking for. If you open each result in a new window, you can easily close the new window, go back to the search result list, and then open the next result in another window. Move the cursor over the link, hold down the right mouse button (hold down CTRL and the mouse button on a Mac) and select "Open link in new window".

The bookmark trick

The recent trend towards including more up to date content in search engine results, makes the following trick all the more attractive.

You may now use the search engine to keep track of recent developments in your field of interest. This means that you will often find yourself writing the same search queries over and over again. And if you are a research professional you will actually find yourself writing quite complex queries over again.

You don't have to. Just bookmark the first page of search results the first time you do this search and use this bookmark (or "favorite" in Internet Explorer terminology) to do your next search. The reason that this works is that Web search forms actually are quite primitive tools as accessing databases goes. The form translates your query into a Web address the search engine can read.

Let's say you want to do a regular search on the term "search engines" in the AllTheWeb news search engine. The query produces the following URL:

http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=news&lang=any&query=search+engines

All you see before the ? is the true Web address of the AllTheWeb search engine. All that comes after the question mark is what the search engine needs to know to perform the search.

cat=news tells the search engine that you want to search the news database only (on not all webpages), lang=any indicates that you have not restricted the search to pages written in one language (which you can if you use the advanced search features) and query=search+engines is the actual query.

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