online search – Citations by Questia http://blog.questia.com Research paper tips from Questia Mon, 16 Jan 2017 17:25:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.5 Culture Club http://blog.questia.com/2010/09/culture-club/ http://blog.questia.com/2010/09/culture-club/#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2010 19:43:36 +0000 http://blog.questia.com/?p=394 Online Search Techniques

“The diversity of cultures represented on the Web is an amazing and wonderful thing,” notes Web expert Barbara G. Friedman, who adds, “But online searches are easily thwarted if the user fails to take into account the myriad spellings and meanings that accompany that diversity. Searching for one will not find sites that use the other spelling, or for that matter sites containing misspellings. In addition, the same word can have alternate meanings even within a single language.”

In her book Web Search Savvy: Strategies and Shortcuts for Online Research (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 20, she offers the following heads-up:

A search effort should take that into account…For example, in English, the word “bank” has several definitions having nothing to do with money. In the U. S., the word “flat” can refer to a level surface, a musical note, or a deflated tire; whereas in Britain a “flat” might refer to an apartment. Unless you provide a search engine more exacting terms your results will be numerous, including sites containing all meanings.

Friedman’s book contains a wealth of information about online search strategy, including other things that can sabotage a search. Check it out.

]]>
http://blog.questia.com/2010/09/culture-club/feed/ 1
Top Search Tips http://blog.questia.com/2010/09/top-search-tips/ http://blog.questia.com/2010/09/top-search-tips/#respond Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:17:04 +0000 http://blog.questia.com/?p=404 Internet Tutorials – Laura B. Cohen’s “basic guide to the Internet” – is a valuable resource for anyone who needs to find information online. Bookmarking her Best Bet Search Tips, for example, means that you’ll always have easy access to proven techniques for effective online research.

Here are a few of Cohen’s good tips:

  • Most search engines default to Boolean AND logic. To create a search that will retrieve Web pages containing all of your search terms, type the words with a space in between them. Example: bears hibernation
  • Use a plus sign (+) to further focus a Boolean AND search. On Google, for example, use of the plus sign will turn off the feature that may include a search for synonyms of your search terms. On other search engines, the plus sign is a kind of insurance that AND logic will be applied. Example: +desert +horticulture
  • Include synonyms or alternate spellings in your search statements and connect these words with Boolean OR logic. OR logic will allow you to retrieve documents containing one or more of your search terms. Search engines are not consistent in the way they want an OR search to be typed out (for example, Google requires that OR be capitalized), so it’s usually best to fill out the form on the advanced search page and let the search engine do the rest. Example: college OR university
  • For a Boolean NOT search, place a minus sign (-) in front of the word you want to exclude from your search results. Example: apple -computer

For other practical suggestions – including when to use advanced search and what to do when the results you get back are either too general or too limited – check out Best Bet Search Tips.

]]>
http://blog.questia.com/2010/09/top-search-tips/feed/ 0
http://blog.questia.com/tag/online-search/feed/
blog.questia.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-04
7691
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5RE4II5SP5FN45Y3EPW5ZLSRP6LOMLFK
<urn:uuid:43df26bb-6255-433d-96a6-147410c46317>
2017-01-17T17:10:02Z
69.32.208.74
sha1:EJJWU4WJXDUR4VSWUUEYE2MY6Q2B6JPB
<urn:uuid:daa9a315-54af-43f3-a992-6729dc79d6cb>
http://blog.questia.com/tag/online-search/feed/
length
response
<urn:uuid:ac13ecc4-94a3-4235-99d3-4f711e9c4492>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf