Reading
This section will distinguish strategies for searching and browsing for information in the library and on the World Wide Web.1. The Library and the Web
2. Printed Materials from the Library
The information available on the Web is very different from what one would expect to find in a library. In an entry on Roman historian Saxo Grammaticus in a printed encyclopedia, one would not expect to find advertising, or direct references to books on Saxo in a bookstore catalog. One would also not expect to find an article at the library on fractals that would provide a tool to create them. And one would not expect that article to have been written by middle school students!
Anyone with a word processor and the space on a Web server can publish their writing on the Web without great technical knowledge or forethought. At the same time, the Web makes possible new kinds of publications and publishers. For instance, to accompany Ken Burns' documentary film, PBS created their Lewis and Clark site to provide information that could not be presented in the original television show, including excerpts from Lewis and Clark's diaries, background information about the Corps of Discovery, links to related resources, a game in which visitors could lead an imaginary Corps of Discovery on a virtual journey, and a forum where visitors could ask questions of the director, Ken Burns.
The Web and the library offer resources which are different, but which often complement each other in interesting and unexpected ways. While a periodical index lists only references to articles in magazines and journals, and a library catalog shows only references to books and periodical titles, a search of the Web might provide information from other media. A Web search for "Titanic" might lead to an online forum about James Cameron's movie, Titanic, a virtual museum exhibit of the Titanic, the lyrics to Celine Dion's song, "My Heart Will Go On," from the Titanic soundtrack; and some home-grown online pamphlets detailing conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Titanic. It is important not to approach the Web as though it were just an online library, or to approach the library as though it were a smaller printed version of the Web.
The Web vs. The Library
Stability of Information
The Library: Printed information is static. An article in the library will be the same, even 20 or 100 years later. But printed information can go out of date quickly. While computer files can be revised continuously, an article or book can only be reissued as a new publication. But because older editions often remain in the collection, you can access the older materials at the library for a historical perspective.
The Web: Web publication is fluid. Sometimes resources disappear or change for no apparent reason. Most Web directories and indexes do not select resources based on their reliability for academic research. At the same time, the Web can distribute more dynamic, interactive, and up-to-date information than libraries.
Accessibility
The Library: If they are available at your institution, library books are easy to find and use. However, if a book has been checked out or is not part of your library's holdings, locating a copy can take a week or more.
The Web: Any number of people from anywhere in the world can consult the same information on the Web at the same time. Information on the Web does not "circulate," it is literally copied to the user's computer. Yet, links can go dead, an online service can suddenly stop working, and computers can crash unexpectedly.
Authority of Publications
The Library: Acquisition specialists at libraries carefully choose the works that are added to their collections. They avoid materials which are not considered authoritative for academic use, or popular enough to add to the library's collection.
The Web: Information you can collect from the Web is sometimes unavailable
in any other form because it has qualities that make it unsuitable for
publication.
2. Printed Materials from the Library
Librarians separate the world of research sources into two domains: popular and scholarly. Popular sources are meant to appeal to a wide audience. They present topics in language that any adult reader can readily understand, although the topics themselves may be complex. Scholarly sources are created byprofessional researchers for other professional researchers. They may use specialized language, and they nearly always contain references to other works.Here is a selected list of the types of sources, both popular and scholarly, you will find at the library during your research, and a short description of the most effective ways they are used.
Reference Books
Reference books are used for finding facts and getting a general overview of a subject. When writing a research paper, avoid relying on reference books for anything more than the occasional fact to support an argument, but even in these cases it would be better to find a more authoritative source. For more information on reference books, see the section of this guide on the reference area of the library.
Books: Popular Books, Monographs, Editions, and Anthologies
Popular books are mass-produced by commercial publishers to reach a wide audience of readers. They are written for a lay audience by independent researchers, freelance writers, and sometimes journalists. Though popular books are usually not as thoroughly researched or as well documented as scholarly books (or monographs), they can often be carefully crafted, useful sources.
A monograph is like a very long research paper. Authors of monographs document their work with footnotes or endnotes, and include a bibliography or "Works Cited" section. Monographs are useful for in-depth analysis of a wide topic, and are usually more authoritative than popular books. For a modest sized research project, you probably would need to refer to only a small section of a monograph.
An anthology is a collection of short researched articles, essays, or stories devoted to a particular topic. Book articles are hard to find with the library catalog because most of the time bibliographic records do not include article titles and authors. Instead, they are classified by the editor's name and the title of the anthology.
An edition is a work which was often not originally intended for publication, but was prepared for publication by a scholar. Collections of letters, literary works (such as the complete plays of Shakespeare), and famous historical documents have all been published in scholarly editions. Editions are often referred to as "primary sources," where works about them are called "secondary sources." Primary sources are original, definitive, works that become the objects of study for others. Secondary sources are later works that might draw on or comment on primary works. Sometimes a secondary source can become a primary source after a long time. For example, English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare (delivered 1811-12) have been edited and published as primary works and became the subject of lectures by more recent critics.
Serials: Periodicals: Newspapers, Magazines, Journals
Unlike other publications that are issued in volumes (like encyclopedias), a "serial" is a publication that is issued in successive parts. There is no limit to the number of parts a serial can have. A periodical is a kind of serial publication that comes out on a regular basis; either daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
Newspapers There is an old saying, "Today's news is tomorrow's history," and it is true enough. If you were working on a paper on the sinking of the Titanic, for example, newspaper stories of eyewitness accounts might be useful.
Magazines Magazines are generally popular sources, so they usually have less authority for academic projects than scholarly journals. Use them to get acquainted with a subject or to understand popular ideas about it. Most magazine articles do not contain bibliographies or footnotes.
Journals publish formal research papers written by scholars. Where magazines rely mostly on interviews and informal research, scholarly journals only publish research from experts who work in academic fields. Journal articles generally have a very narrow focus and treat issues which are mainly of interest to other scholars. For this reason,they are often difficult to read without a lot of background knowledge about the subject. Journal articles contain footnotes, and have lists of "Works Cited" or bibliographies which can lead to more sources.
Sources
Bolner, Mytle S. et al. Library Research Skills Handbook. Dubuque, IA: Kendall / Hunt, 1991.
"Frequently Asked Questions: The Difference Between a Magazine and a
Specialized/Scholarly Journal." 1997. University of Iowa Libraries.
(10 May 1998).
3. World Wide Web Sites
A Web site is a collection of interlinked Web pages. What you are reading now is only one page in a larger Web site, The Scott, Foresman Research Web. There are several varieties of Web sites.1Broadcast Media Sites
Most of the radio and television networks use Web sites to provide supplementary information for their news and information programs. Sometimes a story which is unsuitable for full coverage on network television or radio can get full coverage on the Web.
Examples:
PBS' site for the Nova series, The Secrets of Lost Empires.
Informational Sites
Informational sites include independent and scholarly research in the form of online books, occasional articles, reference sources, fact sheets, and government documents. With informational sites it is important to assess the author's credentials and the sponsor or affiliation of the source carefully. Consult section 35e of the Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers for more information on evaluating sources.
Examples:
Advocacy Web Sites
Advocacy Web sites are created by political organizations and special interest groups to influence public policy. Because advocates set out with a very particular agenda, advocacy pages are generally not objective research sources. They are less likely to discuss opposing views in an even-handed way. On the other hand, advocates often do research that others do not, and sometimes they can offer perspectives or information unavailable from other sources.
Examples:
The American Association of Retired Persons
Web Periodicals
Web periodicals are modeled on print periodicals, but they can include more interactive and multimedia content. All of the best online periodicals archive their back issues so that researchers can search for articles and cite them in their work. Some printed magazines and journals offer back issues online. In cases where an article is available both in print and online, it is better to cite the printed version. Many journal and magazine archives on the Web are purged or moved periodically, so Web citations can go out of date quickly. The printed versions also have page numbers, so citations of printed articles can be more precise. Anyone who reads your paper and who may wish to find cited passages in the original article will appreciate having the page information available.
Examples:
Computer-Mediated Communication
Kairos: A Journal For Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments
Personal Home Pages
A personal home page usually describes the author's interests, lists his or her professional and personal accomplishments, and provides a list of links to other resources. Personal home pages are useful for establishing the credibility of the author, for finding contact information, and for discovering links to other resources by the same author.
Examples:
1. The names of these categories are based on the scheme in Jan Alexander and Marsha Tate, "Evaluating Web Resources." Widener University/Wolfgram Memorial Library. 1998. http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/webeval.htm (10 May 1998).
4. Gathering Sources: Browsing and Searching
4a. Browsing The Library: Classification Systems
4b. Searching the Library: The Library Catalog
4c. Searching Indexes and Abstracts for Articles
4d. Browsing the Web: Web Indexes
4e. Keyword Searching: Sample Phrase, Boolean, +/- Searches
4f. Searching the Web: Web Search Engines
Just as no single resource will satisfy all of your information needs, there is no single method for finding all of the sources important for your research. In this section, we will consider two ways to find library sources: browsing and searching.
Browsing
Since library stacks are organized by subject, to browse the library you can just walk through the stacks and look for materials by subject. To find books about cyberspace and virtual reality, for instance, you could go to the "General Computing" section of the library and look through the titles you find there. Once you find a few books, you might look through their tables of contents or indexes to see what topics they cover. You can also check their bibliographies for references to related sources. To save time and money, browse through a book to make sure it is an appropriate research source before checking it out or photocopying excerpts.
Browsing the Web is a little more difficult because, as the old CERN home page used to say, "There is no 'top' to the World Wide Web." The Web has no standard subject classification system in place for all its resources. Some indexes have been assembled by human editors who browse the Web full time, but they are always far from complete.
Searching
In the library, searching involves working with online databases or printed indexes, using controlled vocabulary or keywords. While using a computer database, a library patron can enter keywords which would be likely to appear in records for sources related to a research topic. For instance, if you were working on a project about William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, and its influence on popular culture, you might experiment by entering the words or expressions: "William Gibson," "Neuromancer," "cyberspace" (a word he invented), or "virtual reality," and mix them with more general terms like "cyberculture," "popular culture," "online," and so on. Each different combination of terms would produce different results. You could also search by author if you want to find other works by William Gibson, or experiment with title searches in case some of the keywords are the beginnings of titles.
These same techniques can be used with Web search engines. A search engine is an online service that uses special software, known as Web spiders, crawlers or robots, to roam the Web and collect links to sources for the service's searchable database.
4a. Browsing The Library: Classification Systems
Since libraries are organized by subject, you can learn a lot about a topic just by visiting the appropriate area of the stacks. Begin by finding out which classification system your library uses--generally either the Library of Congress Classification System (LC) or the Dewey Decimal Classification System (Dewey or DC). Then find a map or shelf guide at your library to see where to find books on your research subject. Or, if you locate a promising source with the library catalog and find it on the shelves, browse in the same area for others like it.
Library of Congress (LC) System
The LC system is used by most college and university libraries because it offers a wide range of possible subject categories. Some libraries catalog new acquisitions with the LC systembut keep older titles under a different system.
Though libraries can assign a book whatever call number they wish, chances are that two libraries using the LC system will assign the same, or a very similar call number to a given book. Here is an example of a typical LC call number (for C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image [Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1967]):
PN 671 .L4 1967LC call numbers have 4 basic elements:
1. They begin with 1-3 letters which correspond to subject categories and sub-categories.
You can find a key to the main categories at Matt Rosenberg's Guide to Library of Congress Subject Headings. The "P" in this LC call number shows that this book falls under the category "Language and Literature."
The next letter shows the sub-category to which the book belongs. In this example, the "N" means that the book belongs to the Literary History and Criticism sub-category.
2. A number, corresponding to the book's topic.
A number shows the book's specific topic. Checking Rosenberg's chart with our example, we can see that the book is about literary history.
3. One or two Cutter numbers
The ".L4" represents the book's particular place in the sequence of books on the shelf. The letter in the Cutter number is usually the first letter of the author's last name.
Some call numbers have two Cutter numbers to divide the subject further. For instance, the call number for William Gibson's Neuromancer is PS3513 .I2824 N49 1984. Notice that the second Cutter number begins, in this case, with the first letter of the title of the book.
4. The year of the book's publication. This number would distinguish
the 1967 edition of Lewis' book from a later edition.The Dewey Decimal (DC) System
The Dewey system is used often in grade schools and public libraries because it is a much less complicated system and it is more suitable for small collections. Forest Press and OCLC have a summary of the Dewey Decimal System subject headings. Here is an example of one public library's Dewey classification for the C. S. Lewis book, The Discarded Image:
809.02 L67There are at least three elements used in this system.
1. The first digit from the left (0-9) shows which discipline the book comes from. The "8" here shows that this is a "Literature and Rhetoric" title. The second two digits show the subject category to which the book belongs. Lewis' book belongs to the category, "History, Description, Criticism."
2. The digits after the decimal point are like the Cutter numbers in the LC system. They locate the author and the title in a sequence of similar works on the subject. The numbers after the decimal can be as long as necessary.
3. Anything else the library adds. This particular library has added a Cutter number on the end, similar to the one we saw in the LC system above.
Browsing for Periodicals
Most college and university libraries keep bound periodicals and microforms classified with one of these systems as well. You can browse the appropriate subject areas to see which periodical titles the library has in its holdings, but obviously browsing for articles on a subject either in books or in bound periodicals is much too difficult and time-consuming.
4b. Searching the Library: The Library Catalog
The problem with relying exclusively on browsing in the library is that since a book can only be shelved in one place, sources for a research topic may be shelved in several places in the library. Luckily, the library catalog database may give a book several subject classifications. So you can search the library catalog by title, subject heading, and keyword to find titles that you may have missed while browsing the stacks, or to find new areas of the library to explore.
Searching the Library on the Web
Most college libraries now offer Web access to their library catalogs. If you do not know where to find your library's home page, you can find it with LibWeb, and follow links to the library catalog. The Web makes it easy to search even several library catalogs at once. Because every catalog organizes features and options a little differently, before working with your library's catalog on the Web, look for help files or tutorial pages on your library's Web site or ask a librarian for help. The example searches that follow were performed with Washington University's online catalog, available through their WorldWindow site.
See this Links Section of this Website for more links to library catalogs and related resources.
Title Searches
When you already know a title for a book and you simply want to locate it, use an "exact title" search. To search for Cyberspace: First Steps, select "search by exact title," enter the title, and get this result.
Even if you do not have a specific title in mind, a title search can be a good place to start. While this method is imprecise and will leave out most of the books you will need, if you are uncertain about which subject headings to use, and you do not have a list of keywords, try a title search. A title search on "virtual reality" will produce this list of titles.
Search by Subject
Subject searching can be difficult because you may not know the exact wording of the subject headings your library catalog uses. If you enter "computer simulation technology," but the catalog only recognizes "Technology -- Computer simulation," you will get bad results. Even punctuation matters: "Technology -- Computer simulation" is different from "Technology--Computer simulation" and "Technology-Computer simulation."
Doing a subject search is often easier if you begin with the list of titles you found with a title search. Toward the bottom of a catalog record is a list of subject categories for the book. Often these subject category lists are highlighted as links that will lead to a list of titles classified with that subject. So, from our list of "virtual reality" titles, you can select one, then look down to the subjects where you see, "Technology -- Computer simulation." You can click on that subject to find an alphabetical list of subject headings. "Technology -- Computer simulation" will be in enlarged bold text, at the middle of the list.
With this approach you can find related subjects in the alphabetical list, and jump from title to title, finding new subjects to search.
Keyword Searches
Another easy way to search for potential sources is to use keywords. The Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers explains what keywords are in section 35c-1. Keyword searches look for any occurrence in the database of the words you specify. You can generate more results with a keyword search than with either a title or subject search on its own. The problem with keyword searches is that they will often hit many records for books that have nothing to do with your research topic.
Here are the results for a keyword search with the words "virtual" and "reality." Notice that the results include works unrelated to the topic. Books like David Gelerntner's, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair come up because the author of the summary in the record for this title uses "virtual reality" as a figure of speech.
Unlike subject headings, keywords can be entered in any order. Some library catalogs, like The University of Texas-Austin's UTCAT, offer Boolean searching, as described in the Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers, section 35d-1. Example Boolean searches appear elsewhere in this guide.
4c. Searching Indexes and Abstracts for Articles
Since periodicals typically cover a wide variety of subjects, browsing them is usually not very productive for a research project. To find relevant articles on your topic, you'll need to consult indexes and abstracts. Every library has a slightly different collection of these resources, but examples of each are listed in The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers, 35d-3 - 35d-6. Consult your library's Web pages for information about which electronic databases are available at your institution. All of these resources are available in the Reference area of the library.
There are a few resources available here for searching for periodical articles online.
Indexes - An index presents just the basic information about an article: the author, title, and information needed to find the source for the article. Most indexes also list keywords or subject headings that can be used to find other articles on the same topic.
Abstracts - Collections of abstracts have all of the features of an index, but they also include a short summary of the entire article. Abstracts are helpful because they can provide enough information to tell whether the source is worth finding.
Citation Indexes - If you find an important scholarly article on your research topic that was published some time ago, you can check a citation index to see if another author has since cited the article. The utility of a citation index may not seem clear at first, but in some situations it may be necessary to know how a particular article influenced researchers that wrote about the same topics later, or to assess the significance of the article in the field.
Bibliographies - Unlike most of the other types of search tools, bibliographies are compiled by prominent scholars who do research in the fields their bibliographies cover. Annotated bibliographies are useful because they provide a short summary or critical assessment for each work they include.
4d. Browsing the Web: Web Indexes
If you arrive at a Web site, you can follow the links in a list of "Works Cited" or "Related Resources," just as you can look through a bibliography at the end of a book to find related printed sources. But since the Web has no overriding organizational structure, it is not truly possible to browse the Web by subject.
However, you can use a Web index to accomplish nearly the same thing. A Web index is simply a professional Web surfer's attempt to place the disparate resources of the Web into discreet categories. This process takes a lot of the "hit and miss" out of the search process that search engines require.
There are many Web indexes available here.
Here are three examples:
Yahoo!
Yahoo! was one of the first major search tools on the WWW. Yahoo!'s success is partially due to good promotion and continuous innovation in their services, but it also has to do with the fact that Yahoo! is still one of the easiest indexes to use. Although it has a smaller database than the major search engines, Yahoo! can still produce a list of the most essential sites as well as any search engine.
The most effective way to use Yahoo! is to start by selecting a subject link from the front page and select categories until you find a list of links to sources relevant for your research. Or, find a category close to your research subject, then enter a word or phrase related to your topic in the "Search" box, select the "just this category" option from the pull-down menu next to it, and hit the "Search" button to find links on your particular topic.
Yahoo! can be a useful page to keep toward the top of your bookmarks list. If you are looking for a specific Web page by title (if, for instance, you found a great resource but forgot to bookmark it), you can simply enter the title in quotation marks to find a link directly to the site. Yahoo! will usually find the link without listing an overwhelming number of unrelated pages in the results.
The Argus Clearinghouse
You may remember that the Argus Clearinghouse can be a useful source for finding research subjects. The Clearinghouse is actually a directory of Web subject guides which are likely to lead to reliable research sources because the guides are compiled by specialists in the various fields of study. The Clearinghouse has developed an important rating system for Web subject guides which is worth reading about before you do any serious work their site.
Mining Co.
The Mining Company is similar to the Clearinghouse, but where the Clearinghouse has emerged from the academic community, the Mining Co. is a commercial service. Most of the Mining Co. "guides," the Mining Co.'s subject specialists, work in an area close to the subjects they present in their pages, but most are not scholars.
You can browse the Mining Co. for pages by subject from the main page or alphabetically by topic from the A-Z Site List.
4e. Keyword Searching: Sample Phrase, Boolean, +/- Searches
While the resources available on the Web and in online periodical indexes are often completely different in nature, the methods for keyword searching with Web search engines and periodical indexes are often much the same. It is important to choose precise keywords, ones that express what you are looking for well enough to exclude irrelevant records, but it is equally important to be able to express relationships between keywords in your search queries. For a typical Web search engine, the order in which words are entered does not matter, a search for ""dog bites man" will produce exactly the same results as ""man bites dog." This section will explain different ways that users can express relationships between keywords while searching databases and Web search engines.
Plain Keywords
Suppose you are interested in learning about the Mercury Seven, the original seven astronauts chosen by NASA during the 1950's to fly the first American space missions. On many databases, entering the words Mercury 7 will lead to disappointing results. Any records that mention the planet Mercury, astronaut Scott Carpenter's Mercury mission, the Mercury Sable automobile, and the Roman god Mercury, and happen to include the number "7," will drown out the relevant records. To get better results, enter more specific keywords:
Phrase Searching (" ")
Many specialized library databases automatically interpret a series of unpunctuated keywords as a whole phrase or proper name ("Baked Alaska," "Dave Barry," "apple pie"). Records that contain the keywords in the sequence in which they are entered appear at the top of the list of results (so records containing "Baked Alaska" would show up higher on the list of results than those that contain "Alaska baked"). Infoseek is one of the few search engines that interpret keywords in this way.
Other Web search engines such as AltaVista, HotBot, Excite, and Yahoo! Search, do not recognize the sequence in which terms are entered. For these search engines, phrases and proper names have to be put in quotation marks (" ").
Try searching AltaVista for a phrase by putting it in quotation marks: "Mercury 7"
Compare these results with the original Mercury 7 search.
Include and Exclude (+/-)
Another way to make a Web search query more precise is to specify keywords to be required and excluded. In the Mercury search, only pages about NASA astronauts are desired:
The "exclude" symbol, minus (-), can be used with any combination of keywords to exclude pages that contain homonyms. To widen the last search about the Mercury Seven, but avoid unrelated pages on the Sinclair Institute's "Mercury Seven" program and Freddie Mercury of the rock group Queen, you could exclude phrases:
"Mercury Seven" -Institute -games -Queen
Truncation: Wildcards
Most search tools allow truncation with wildcard characters so that a user can enter one term to express all the variants of that term (strawberry/strawberries, place/places/placement, merry/merriment/merriness/merrily). To truncate a term, you can use a designated character ("?" or "*", depending on the search tool) that can be added at the end of a partial term (strawberr*, place*, merr*). We could revise the "astronaut" search to include pages that contain "astronaut" or "astronauts":
Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR)
Most library databases and some Web search engines (including AltaVista Advanced Search and Excite) allow users to express relationships between keywords with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT or sometimes AND NOT, NEAR--always in uppercase). Boolean operators can be combined to add even more specificity to a search. By placing one of the Boolean operators between terms you can include and exclude terms, find cases where terms occur a certain number of words from each other, and account for synonyms for words in a phrase.
Here is one instance where a Boolean search is useful. I was once looking for a short summary of the Latin text of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. I started by just entering Boethius. This search produced some useful links but none of them led to a summary of the work. Next I tried this combination:
+Boethius +"Consolation of Philosophy"
This search produced too many hits, so I tried an advanced search with Boolean operators:
Boethius AND ("Consolation of Philosophy" NEAR summary)
This search was a bull's-eye. When working with Boolean operators, parentheses can be used to mark off "sub-queries." All of the terms in parentheses are taken as a single unit in the main query. The search engine reads the whole query above as, "Give me any pages that include both the phrase 'Consolation of Philosophy' and 'summary;' then, from the results of that query, report back only those pages that also include the word 'Boethius.'"
4f. Searching the Web: Web Search Engines
While Web indexes are assembled by human editors, Web search engine databases are collected automatically by Web crawling programs. Many search engines, like AltaVista, catalog entire Web pages so that page content can be searched along with the page titles and descriptions. Unfortunately, there is no single search engine available that has been able to find and reliably catalog all of the pages on the Web. Because pages and entire sites are moved or are removed from the Web, and many more are added every minute, it is impossible to keep an accurate record of them all.
Suggested General Search Engines
We have a list of several search engines useful for doing research on the Web. Here are descriptions of a few general-purpose search engines:
Infoseek
Phrase searching: yes: "" or - (hyphen)Dogpile
Includes/Excludes: yes: + only
Proximity Search: limited (keywords taken in sequence)
Boolean logic: no
Meta-search: no
Web index: yesFeatures:
Infoseek is a good search engine for new Web searchers, and a good place to start any search. Infoseek can search for Web pages, USENET postings, news stories, phone numbers, addresses, and e-mail addresses. Infoseek also has a Web index of rated sites. Here are some of Infoseek's features:
Names and Titles:
If you type Max Roach into the search box, Infoseek will look for pages that contain the name Max Roach. If you type max roach it will look for pages that contain max or Max, and/or roach or Roach somewhere on the page. Infoseek also recognizes other kinds of names: Saint Louis University, Led Zeppelin, and so on. Separate names in a sequence with commas:
Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk
Phrase Searching:
Phrases can be expressed with quotation marks or hyphens: "runs batted in" "stolen bases"
or
runs-batted-in stolen-bases
Sub-searching:
Sub-searching lets users search for keywords, then search among the results to narrow the list further. On the results page from any search, Infoseek provides a button to perform sub-searches. Queries can be written to include sub-searches with the pipe (|) character to save a step: CharlieParker | discography
Phrase searching: yes: ""HotBot
Includes/Excludes: yes: +/-
Boolean logic: yes: AND OR NOT
Proximity Search: yes: NEAR
Meta-search: yes
Web index: no
Features:Multi-search:
Dogpile is a multi-search engine. Instead of searching its own database, Dogpile will search twenty-five different commercial search databases, including Yahoo!, Lycos, HotBot, Excite, and others, and present the results all at once. These features can save time for simple searches.
Meta-search:
Dogpile also has Metafind, a program that will search several databases at once and create a single list of all of the results. See the Metafind Help page for more details.
Operators:
You can use any of the possible operators with a query. Arfie, the "fetch" software, will translate them into the appropriate format for each of the databases it checks.
Dogpile should not be used as a substitute for other search tools. It only gives the top 10 results from each search engine. Metafind also has limits on the number of hits it will present. Another important reason is that all search engines have their own particular features for refining searches. In some cases, it is easier to go directly to the source to customize a search than to send the query through Dogpile. Finally, Dogpile is designed for users who are searching for as much information about a topic as possible. Researchers looking for a particular page, or for information that would be likely to appear on too many pages, would have better luck using a single search engine.
Phrase searching: yes: ""
Includes/Excludes: yes: + or -
Boolean logic: yes: AND OR NOT
Proximity Search: no
Meta-search: no
Web index: yesHotBot is the creation of Wired Ventures, the company that publishes Wired Magazine and produces Wired online. HotBot is probably the most powerful search engine available, not just because it has one of the largest databases of full Web pages (about 50 million), but because it offers many useful ways to customize searches. The "simple" HotBot search page can be set to recognize or ignore Boolean operators; to search pages added after a particular time; to search in only a particular domain (.com, .org, .edu) and region on the Internet; and to search for pages that contain images, audio, Shockwave files, and/or video. HotBot can also search for USENET posts, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, domain names, wire service news stories, and shareware.
HotBot also offers an advanced, SuperSearch, page that offers even more options for searching the Web.