site: search

A few weeks ago I stated that special operators are seldom needed.

I'm surprised no one challenged that.

Special operators (site: inurl: intitle: etc.) do have good uses. Thanks to Alan November, here's a good use of the site: command. The example Alan gave in his IETC keynote last Friday was searching for information on how Turkish bloggers viewed a controversial speech by the Pope (back in 2006) that Islam is violent religion--a speech resulting in rioting and deaths. A reasonable query for this purpose is: pope speech riot Islam Turkey. But if you look at the results, you don't see Turkish perspectives but information published by Time, Wikipedia, the Daily Mail and the like.

But this query produces very different results: pope speech riot Islam site:tr. The site abbreviation for Turkey is tr. Now all the results are from Turkey. The site: command is especially good for filtering results from a specific location, like a country.

What other uses can you think of?

Sesame Street Challenge

As you probably know, Sesame Street is 40 years old. Here's a challenge to test your ability to find reference information about the show.

On what show did Ernie trick Bert into saying, "I ate the sandbox?" Provide the number of the show.

Before you start, think about a search strategy. There's lots to think about here:

• What keywords are provided?
• What keywords are good as is?
• How important is that phrase?
  
• What words are not needed?
• What words may be needed that aren't given? (this is always the hardest part of the strategy and may rely on seeing results first).
• Who might know the answer (where would an expert put the information)?
• How do I get close enough to "home in" on the information?
• How can I check the credibility of the answer?

Thinking about how to search is often lost in the activity of searching. Everyone makes choices about terms, operators and where to look. What choices are you making?

Basic vs Advanced Searching

You probably don't use advanced search options very often.

You're not alone. Advanced searchers--such as the members of the search group at Google--use just the basic search functions more than 95% of the time. In practice, no more than 1 search in 20 requires special or Boolean operators other than AND, which is nothing more than using the space key.

You might expect that very experienced searchers would use specialized search tools more than that. Knowing how to use special operators is only a small part of becoming a search expert.

After leading search strategy workshops for a couple of years, I came to realize how little I depended on anything other than good keywords. Boolean operators (except for AND) are not needed most of the time. In fact, unless you really know how to use them, they either limit your search in ways you don't want or yield results you don't expect.

So the first point is that you really don't need to use them. This goes for "", OR, NOT, inurl: and a host of others. Concentrate on the quality of your keywords; that's what does the heavy lifting.

The second point is to know when you really do need an operator. My advice is never to use double quotes ("") around a phrase unless you know for certain that is the exact string you need to query. "Carl Heine" will return all the references to my name, but won't return any occurences of Heine, Carl (which is just as likely) or Carl A. Heine which includes my middle initial. Quotes is a good device for cutting down on the number of keywords in a longer query, for example: bison statistics 2008 "North America" (when you are confident that North America will be included in the information you want).

The OR operator is helpful when you want to cut down on the length of a query and believe there are multiple terms (usually rival nouns or adjectives) that might be in the information. For example: bison statistics OR population OR research 2008 "North America" That's still a four term query.

If you've discovered a time when NOT was essential to a search, let me know. Most of the time it eliminates results that may be valuable without giving you a chance to see them.

I don't believe I've ever needed to use inurl:, intitle: or any of the other in_: operators to find information. Keywords get the job done quite nicely.

Can you be an expert searcher without knowing operators? Over 95% of time, yes.

The real advanced part of being an expert searcher relies on the ability to use words sparingly and recognize words that are more powerful than others in the context being searched. That takes quite a bit of experience using words and predicting how they may be used in the type of search being conducted. For most children that presents a real challenge. They will need help while their linguistic skills mature.

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