Finding, not searching

By Melissa Thibault

You can work smarter, not harder, by determining your searching style, learning more about what your searches return and why, and learning to look in the right place first.

Let’s face it. No one likes to search.

Everybody likes to find.

This is especially evident when you send a student to the Media Center to find out the population of Canada. The student sits at the first available computer, opens a Web browser, and types "Canada" into the search box on Yahoo. By the time the bell rings to go to the next class, they have visited 23 of the 6423 sites and 4 of the 332 categories, and still have found no demographic information! Not an empowering experience for the student.

The only thing worse than wasting your students’ time is wasting you own time. If you are lucky enough to get a few moments during the day to search for a new site to use with your ecology unit or a graphic to add to your PowerPoint presentation, the last thing you need is to spend the time searching. But you can work smarter, not harder, by determining your searching style, learning more about what your searches return and why, and learning to look in the right place first.

Searching styles

Searching style is much like learning style: it can be very different for different people. Some people are what you might call "command driven." They know what they want, and they just want to find exactly what they need. They commonly choose a search engine like Google, and use the advanced search screen to make sure that the results they get are as relevant as possible. Other people are "browsers." They know generally what they want but they would like to drift through related materials to see what’s out there. These searchers would choose a site categorized by subject like About.com, and drill down to the category that matches their area of interest. From there they can easily browse relevant sites. You may fit one of these types, or you may sometimes exhibit characteristics of both types. The important thing is to understand that how you like to search will help to determine which search tool you should choose.

Beyond search style and personal preference is your specific information need. Information need is the most important consideration when choosing a search strategy. By looking at how search tools gather information, we can learn which tools are best to find particular formats of information. When we need a reference book in the library to answer a question, there are questions we ask ourselves to help us define where to begin our search. For example, if we’re looking for a superlative such as the oldest living human being, we think immediately about the Guinness Book of World Records. If we need a definition, we think dictionary. Population statistics? Almanac. There is a similar approach to searching the Internet but because we don’t understand the scope and function of many search tools, we don’t know where to start. See also "Tools of the Trade for Information Seekers" to learn more about selecting a search tool that best meets your information needs.

How can I stop searching and start finding?

Over time, information seekers can determine how effective their strategies are by looking at the relevance of their returns. However, the process of improving search skills is much more (dare we say) "hit or miss!" Some search tools are designed to assist users, and through using these tools you can analyze your search behavior and improve your information seeking success.

Clusty returns hits categorized by subject. By careful consideration of the categories on the left navigation bar, users can clearly see all the ways their searches could be misunderstood by a search tool. For example, the search string "lesson plans north carolina" could mean more than one thing — lesson plans from North Carolina or lesson plans about North Carolina. Rather than re-thinking the search or scrolling through 184 hits, the Clusty search results allow the user to chose a category, "Teacher Resources" or "History." No only are your results more focused, but you can learn to look for the terms and phrases that could be easily misunderstood by the automated indexes we use to find information on the Web. (Try a "lesson plans north carolina" on Vivisimo and see for yourself.)

Gigablast.com returns "giga bits" which are related terms you can select to fine-tune your search. Resulting hits are web page hits more relevant to your search. A search for "lesson plans north carolina" on Gigablast provides many more returns than the same search on Vivisimo, but the suggestions for narrowing the search may help you to learn strategies to return more focused results in the future. (Try a sample search for "lesson plans north carolina" on Gigablast.com and see for yourself.)

You can also try a more direct approach to improving your search success by reading SearchEngineWatch’s SearchDay issues about common search blunders. The two-part article "Seven Stupid Searching Mistakes, Part 1" and "Seven Stupid Searching Mistakes, Concluded" details searching approaches that trip up even the experts.