Re: Search Engine Seminar, Day 4: Search Query Strategies

> It has been said that Google's uncanny accuracy with search results 
> has made us complacent.  We have grown comfortable with simply typing 
> in a few words, and having an exact match show up in the first two or 
> three results.  But what if it's not in those first few links?  Or the

> first page -- or the first ten pages of results?  What then?

Actually, an important first step is to change the preferences option
that all the major search engines offer, so you see 100 results at a
time, rather than just 10 or 20. There may be plenty of good stuff just
slipping off the radar screen. Get a bigger picture.

> It means we have to reevaluate our search strategy, and try a 
> different type of search.  It means we will have to develop a 
> different type of query, one that is more than just a string of three 
> or four words.  Where to start?

Another strategy isn't to refine your query but take the same one
elsewhere. It may be that the exact search at another search engine will
work. And using a meta search engine easily lets you get a sense of what
several search engines think, all at once.

I also encourage people to refine queries by thinking more like the
author. An example I always trot out was someone looking for "cheap
floor tiles" to put in his kitchen. As you can imagine, those selling
floor tiles may not want to call them cheap. But "discount floor tiles,"
you might have more like.

How would the author of the material you seek have written it? What
words would they use? If you want something written by a lawyer, then
make use of legal terms as you'd expect. They might use specific types
of numbers or references about legal filings. But if you want a look at
what the general public thinks, they probably wouldn't make use of
certain jargon. This is exactly what Tara was already pointing out. It's
a matter of putting yourself in someone else's head.

Another good tip I recall came from Google's director of technology,
Craig Silverstein. Don't ask questions -- phrase questions as answers.
"What's the highest mountain in North America." OK, that would probably
work -- but "the highest mountain in North America is" as a search is
more likely to capture a page that has the actual answer on it.

Also make good use of search refinement tools, when offered. Teoma's
Refine, AltaVista's Prisma, Vivisimo's clustering, these are great ways
to see other types of queries or words that you might want to add to
your mix. And something like Grokker,
http://www.groxis.com/service/grok/, it's a visual tool you have to pay
for, but in the right instances, it found it useful. It lets you fly
through thousands of pages visually. For most queries, it's overkill.
But when you are stumped on which way to go, yep, pretty cool.

Also, if you've got a page that seems sort of what you like, see if
Google or Yahoo is telling you that this page is listed in one of their
human-compiled directories. This is show below the page description. Go
into the directory, and get a sense of what the editor of that directory
has called the category. The category name might help you refine more --
and seeing the other pages and descriptions might inspire, as well.

cheers,
danny

-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan 
Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
http://searchenginewatch.com



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There is a read/write Web page with resources that will be linked there and used during the Seminar on PDFs for lawyers and legal applications:

http://Network-Lawyers.org/PDFLinks

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