FINDING AND EVALUATING INFORMATION ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Basic Search Strategy: The Ten Steps

The following list provides a guideline for you to follow in formulating search requests, viewing search results, and modifying search results. These procedures can be followed for virtually any search request, from the simplest to the most complicated. For some search requests, you may not want or need to go through a formal search strategy. If you want to save time in the long run, however, it’s a good idea to follow a strategy, especially when you’re new to a particular search engine. It takes time to get used to each search engine’s features and how they are expressed in the search query, so a basic search strategy can help. If your search is multi-faceted, and you want to get the most relevant results possible, following the Ten Steps will ensure good results, if there is something available on the topic you’re researching. The Ten Steps are:

1. Identify the important concepts of your search.
2. Choose the keywords that describe these concepts.
3. Determine whether there are synonyms, related terms, or other variations of the keywords that should be included.
4. Determine which search features may apply, i.e., truncation, proximity operators, Boolean operators, etc.
5. Choose a search engine.
6. Read the search instructions on the search engine’s home page. Look for sections entitled help, advanced search, frequently asked questions, etc.
7. Create a search expression, using syntax which is appropriate for the search engine.
8. View the results. How many hits were returned? Were the results relevant to your query?
9. Modify your search if needed. Go back to steps 2-4 and revise your query accordingly.
10. Try the same search in a different search engine, following steps 6-9 above.

For multi-faceted searches a full-text database is best. For a search involving one facet like a person’s name or a phrase without stop words, search engines that provide keyword indexing will be sufficient.

After determining whether your search has yielded too few Web pages (low recall), there are several things to consider:

• Perhaps the search expression was too specific; go back and remove some terms that are connected by ANDs.
• Perhaps there are more possible terms to use. Think of more synonyms to OR together. Try truncating more words if possible.
• Check spelling and syntax (a forgotten quotation mark or a missing parentheses)
• Read the instructions on the help pages again.

If your search has given you too many results with many not on the point of your topic (high recall, low precision), consider the following:

• Narrow your search to specific fields, if possible.
• Use more specific terms; i.e., instead of cancer, use the specific type of cancer you’re interested in
• Add additional terms with AND or NOT.
• Remove some synonyms if possible.

Search Strategies in Alta Vista

Following the steps of the Basic Search Strategy, we’ll first explore Alta Vista at http://www. altavista.digital.com.

1. Identify the important concepts of your search.

We want to find World Wide Web documents on the topic of the effects of self-esteem on young girls’ likelihood to develop eating disorders. There has been a lot of research done in the past ten years about how changes in modern life have hurt teenaged girls’ development and we’d like to see if any of this research has been published on the Web. We want to focus on the topic of self-esteem as a causal factor in eating disorders among young women.

The main terms or keywords are: teenage girls, self-esteem, and eating disorders.

For teenage: adolescent, adolescence
For eating disorders: anorexia nervosa, bulimia
For self-esteem: self-respect

When developing a search expression, keep in mind that you place OR between synonyms and AND between the different facets of the search topic. It may help to write down all of the synonyms you choose to help with the construction of the final search phraseology. There can be different ways to express the same idea. For example, in part A. , Teenage girls, you could say "teenage girls" or "adolescen* girls" instead of ("teenage or adolescen*) and girls. Note that by truncating the group of letters adolescen, we would retrieve the words adolescent and adolescence. Take a few minutes to determine whether you have used all of the search features that you possibly can before you get online. It can save you a lot of time in the long run.

A. Teenage girls
      teenage
           OR
       adolescen (truncate this )
           AND
      girls

B. Eating disorders
      eating disorders (as a phrase)
           OR
      anorexia nervosa (as a phrase)
           OR
      bulimia

C. Self-esteem
      self-esteem (as a phrase)
           OR
      self-respect (as a phrase)

We chose Alta Vista because it is a full text database. This means that all the words in every document can be searched by its search engine. AltaVista is a very large and powerful search tool. Alta Vista also supports Boolean and nested Boolean searching, which is necessary for the multi-faceted topic we are searching for. 

Click on the Open icon, and type the following URL: http://www.altavista.digital.com and then click on the Open button.

 You could also open Alta Vista by clicking on the pane in the window labeled Location. After the pane changes color, type the URL and press enter.

Alta Vista has two search modes: simple and advanced. The simple search mode supports implied or pseudo-Boolean searching only. This means that you could perform an AND and NOT search by typing a "+" before the word if it has to appear in each of the results, and a "-" before words that you don’t want to appear in the results. Since our topic involves many ORs, we will need to do an advanced search. When you open Alta Vista, you will see the simple search query box. You will need to go to the advanced query section. Then you will want to look at the search instructions for the advanced search capability in Alta Vista. 

Click on the "Advanced" button.

 Your screen will fill with the advanced search form. 

Click on the "help" button..

 After reading the extensive help screens in Alta Vista, you can start to determine how to construct your search expression. In addition to finding out how to combine Boolean operators with phrases and parentheses, you’ll need to find out how Alta Vista truncates words. You’ll also need to read the section on the Results Ranking Criteria. This is a crucial part of Alta Vista’s advanced search mode. You must type words in this section that you want to be in the first documents that are returned to you. If you don’t, the results will be listed in any order, and the first documents may not be as relevant as the last documents returned.

Now that you’ve read the search help, it’s time to formulate the search expression. It will help to write it out before you type it in the search form. The following is a possible way to express this search:
(teenage or adolescen*) and girls and ("eating disorders" or "anorexia nervosa" or bulimia) and ("self-esteem" or "self-respect")

Keep in mind that you can always modify your search at a later time. Let’s try typing it in the search form provided. 

Scroll up to the top of the help page and click on Advanced.

  

Type the search expression in the search form.

  

In the Results Ranking Criteria box, type in the phrase "eating disorders".

 

Make sure all of the quotation marks are present, and you’ve closed all of the parentheses properly. Check your spelling and determine whether you have ands and ors in the proper places. 

Click on Submit Advanced Query.

 

This search query returned 100 hits to the screen. Take a look at a few of the titles. Do they appear to be relevant? 

Click on the title of the first result on the list.

 Take a look at the first page that appears on your screen. Is the information relevant to our search query? Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on 2 to get to the next page of results. Look through the results on this page to see if they seem to be relevant.

After viewing the results, we determine that they are relevant, and the amount of hits returned is an adequate set to work with. You may, however, want to limit the results by date. You could do this by going back to the search query screen and typing a date in the space provided.

Now you could go to another search engine and try the same search there. Remember that you have to review the search features of the search engine you choose before you type the search expression, because the search expression we used in Alta Vista would probably not work in that search engine.

Other Resources

The following Web resources will help you learn more about search techniques:

• Advanced Web Searching: Tricks of the Trade http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/MayOL/zorn5.html
• Ask Scott: Your Guide to Finding it on the Internet http://users.why.net/redbear/scott/
• Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html
• Literature About Search Services (A Bibliography) http://www.ub2.lu.se//desire/radar/lit-about-search-services.html
• Search Engines: What They Are, How They Work, and Practical Suggestions for Getting the Most Out of Them http://webreference.com/content/search/how.htm
• The Search is Over: The Search-Engine Secrets of the Pros http://www.zdnet.com/pccomp/features/fea1096/sub2.html
• Sink or Swim: Internet Search Tools & Techniques http://www.sci.ouc.bc.ca/libr/connect96/search.htm

 

Evaluating Resources from the World Wide Web

Goal

When we access or retrieve something on the World Wide Web we need to be able to decide whether the information is useful, reliable, or appropriate for our purposes.

Who is the author or institution?

• If the author is a person, does the resource give biographical information about him or her, including any of the following: educational and other credentials, position, institutional affiliation, and street address? (Sometimes an e-mail address is not enough.)
• If the author is an institution, is there information provided about it, including the purpose and history of the institution, in addition to a street address?
• Have you seen the author’s or institution’s name cited in other sources or bibliographies?
• The URL can give clues to the authority of a source. A tilde ~ in the URL usually indicates that it is a personal page rather than part of an institutional Web site. Also, make a mental note of the domain section of the URL, as follows:
 

.edu	educational (anything from serious research to zany student pages)
.gov	governmental (usually dependable)
.com	commercial (may be trying to sell a product)
.net	network (may provide services to commercial or individual customers)
.org	organization (non-profit institutions; may be biased)

 
• If the page is part of a larger institution’s Web site, does the institution appear to filter the information that appears at its site? Is the information provided put through some screening process before it is put on the Web?

• Is there a date on the Web page that indicates when the page was placed on the Web?
• Is it clear when the page was last updated?
• Is some of the information obviously out-of-date?
• Does the page creator mention how frequently the material is updated?

• Is the Web page intended for the general public, scholars, practitioners, children, etc.? Is this clearly stated?
• Does the Web page meet the needs of its stated audience?

• Are there political, ideological, cultural, religious, or institutional biases?
• Is the content intended to be a brief overview of the information or an in-depth analysis?
• If the information is opinion is this clearly stated?
• If there is information copied from other sources is this acknowledged? Are there footnotes if necessary?

• Is the purpose of the information to inform, explain, persuade, market a product, or advocate a cause?
• Is the purpose clearly stated?
• Does the resource fulfill the stated purpose?

Look for the name of the author or institution at the top or bottom of a Web page.

Go to the home page for the site that hosts the information to find out about the organization.

To find further information about the institution or author use a search engine to see what related information is available on the Web.

Use Deja News, http://www.dejanews.com, or another tool to search archives of Usenet articles to find other information about the author or institution, and in the case of an individual to see what sorts of articles they’ve posted on Usenet.

Check the top and bottom of a Web page for the date the information was last modified or updated. If no date is present look at the Document Info if you’re using Netscape, or the Properties if you’re using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Other Resources
 

Guides to evaluating library resources:

• Evaluating What You Have Found, University of Waterloo Library http://library.uwaterloo.ca/howto/howto28.html
• How to Critically Analyze Information Sources, References Services Division of the Cornell University Library http://urisref.library.cornell.edu/skill26.htm

Brief guides to evaluating resources on the World Wide Web:

• Evaluating the Documents You Have Found on the World Wide Web, Gillian Westera http://www.curtin.edu.au/curtin/library/staffpages/gwpersonal/senginestudy/zeval.htm
• Evaluating World Wide Web Information, Ann Scholz, Purdue University Libraries http://thorplus.lib.purdue.edu/research/classes/gs175/3gs175/evaluation.html
• Practical Steps in Evaluating Internet Resources, Elizabeth Kirk, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University http://milton.mse.jhu.edu:8001/research/education/practical.html
• Significance, Iowa State University http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/signif.htm
• Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources, Esther Grassian, UCLA College Library http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/critical.htm

Guides to evaluating resources on the World Wide Web:

• Criteria for evaluation of Internet Information Resources, Alastair Smith, VUW Department of Library and Information Studies, New Zealand http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/index.htm
• Evaluating information found on the Internet, Elizabeth Kirk, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University http://milton.mse.jhu.edu:8001/research/education/net.html
• Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators - Critical Evaluation Surveys, Kathleen Schrock http://www.capecod.net/schrockguide/eval.htm
• Teaching Critical Evaluation Skills for World Wide Web Resources, Jan Alexander and Marsha Tate, Wolfgram Memorial Library, Widener University http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/webeval.htm

Bibliographies for evaluating Web resources:

• Bibliography on Evaluating Internet Resources, Nicole Auer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University http://refserver.lib.vt.edu/libinst/critTHINK.HTM
• Evaluating Web Sites for Educational Uses: Bibliography and Checklist, Carolyn Kotlas, Institute for Academic Technology http://www.iat.unc.edu/guides/irg-49.html
• Information Quality WWW Virtual Library, T.M.Ciolek http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-InfoQuality.html
• Web Evaluation Techniques: Bibliography, Jan Alexander and Marsha Tate, Wolfgram Memorial Library, Widener University http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/wbstrbib.htm

INFOTECH WEEKLY - May 19, 1997
WWW-Teach
VENONA

URL: http://www.mwc.edu/ernie/facacad/search-eval.html
Last Updated: May 21, 1997
Send Rants/Raves to Ernest Ackermann, ernie@mwc.edu
Copyright 1997, Ernest Ackermann and Karen Hartman.