How to Perform Searches

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Secrets of Searching the Web & Promoting Your Website

Entering Search Words

There is a single long data entry line for each search engine where you enter search words into Eureka! In general, you should enter search words in all lower case letters separated by spaces. You should never use commas, dashes, or other delimiters. It doesn't hurt, and it may help, to enter capital letters for some formal names.

Most search engines ignore case, a few allow you to direct whether a search should be case sensitive, and a few will use case, whether you select it or not, to refine their search. They will produce different results if you enter "san jose" versus "San Jose" as a search item. If in doubt, enter the capital letters for formal names.

Some search engines are sensitive to the order of word entry. You may get quite different results from the following two strings of words, "engineer silicon valley" versus "silicon valley engineer". In general, enter the more important or discriminating words first. If you don't get the results you are looking for, you might try changing their order to see if it produces a different result.

Some search engines allow you to enter perl regular expressions. This can be a very powerful feature if you know how to do this. Other search engines allow you to enter very complex request using complex logic expressions. Again, if you have the knowledge, you may want to use it. If you don't, I wouldn't worry about it. You will probably still find your resources, maybe just not as quickly as the other guy.

Qualifying Matching of Search Words

If you are looking for a subject that you expect will have many resources, you should select Match All Words, or even Match Exact Phrase. If you are looking for the esoteric or rare, you should specify Match Any Words. If in doubt, use the default setting. You can change or refine your specifications depending on the results of the first search.

Narrowing the Search

Some search engines allow you to limit or narrow down your search in various ways. This is a very useful feature which can save you time. The feature does not produce more or better results, nor does it produce less results, It simply saves time by telling the search engine to ignore areas where you are pretty sure you aren't going to find what you are seeking. For example, if you are looking for a business you know is located in California, if the engine permits, it would make sense to restrict your search to the United States, or better yet, to the state of California, or even the city. You can also speed up the results even more by restricting the domain to "com" so the engine doesn't have to look at all those education (edu), government (gov) and other sites (se,uk,fi, etc.).

Other engines allow you to specific a date range or to weight the age of a resource. If you are interested in looking only at this weeks job listings for the San Francisco area in the newsgroups and you limit the date or age of the resource sought, the search engine will not only return the results that much more quickly, but you will also have a lot less extraneous information to wade through, saving more time.

Controlling the Output of Your Search

As mentioned above, you can specify in some cases whether you want a Terse, Standard, or Verbose output. This controls the amount of information you receive for each item. Other options may permit you to control the order of the output by ranking, sorting, or rating the information and presenting it in a prescribed matter. Take advantage of these features when available.

You can also control the number of items returned by most search engines. This feature, if available, is always located immediately to the right of the search button. More is not necessarily better. You should start with the default option provided. Our defaults do no always coincide with the defaults established by the engines provider. They are sometimes more concerned with the load on their search engine's machine than they are with the proper quantity of the results.

You should also exercise great care when dealing with multisearch engines which may be returning results from as many as six search engines in a single search. Not only will you overload the machine by asking for too much, you may be a long time waiting for results which may not be better with 50 hits per engine than with 10 hits per engine. And you still have to wade through all that output. If too many people overload the machine, you will get polite suggestions that you take your search elsewhere because the machine is out of capacity to handle any more searches.

Getting Around in Eureka!

Click on a search engine from the list at the top of the page and you will be delivered to the engine instantly. Do your search. Then use your BACK button on your menu bar to return to Eureka! to perform another search. In many cases you will find that performing the search with Eureka!'s interface is much easier than using the search engines interface, so for repeat searches of the engine you will probably want to come back to Eureka!.

Finished with that engine? Just click on the word "TOP" and you will go back up to the main list of search engines. "TOP" does not appear on each search engine in our list because of space considerations, but it should be close by in another one.

Learning How to Search

If you are new to using search engines, here are a few suggestions on learning how to best take advantage of them. Try one of the more complex search engines that has lots of options for search criteria and controlling results output. Use the same search words but vary the search parameters to see how it affects the results. It is best to use search words for a topic or subject that you feel you have expert knowledge. That way you'll be able to better evaluate the results. Do this for a robot, ("R"), and for a directory ("D").

Next, just proceed down the list of engines and try each one, one by one, using the same words and the same search parameters and note the difference in results. You can use copy and paste to move the words from one engine to the next. This is one of the advantage of Eureka! You can easily compare the search engines side by side to see what they have to offer for a particular search. Eventually, certain of these engines will become favorites for the kind of searching you do.

Secrets of Searching the Web & Promoting Your Website