Free Range Librarian

Mary Ellen Bates gave a great talk on search at Internet Librarian 2003. She offered many more tips, but these were the ones that stood out for me.

Always use more than one search engine… surprisingly little overlap among search engine indexes, and relevance ranking surfaces different URLs
Use Alta Vista’s world keyboard to insert non Roman characters
Use AltaVista’s “sort by” box to focus results
Alta Vista is the one search engine that supports “near” –try holistic NEAR veterinarian , then add a sort term and sort
Use thesauri to find different terms
Try Google’s new “define” feature: e.g. define sheep
watch for alternative phrasing, e.g. retirement vs.superannuation
To use Google’s synonym feature: ~term
Be aggressive with “pearl culturing” (also called citation seed growing)–digging through citations in high-confidence documents
Use tools, not search engines; then use a search engine to find a tool, and then let a tool find the answer
Search for sources, not just information
Assume the key information will be buried in the invisible Web
Use AlltheWeb’s URL investigator: excellent background on a Web site
Use “reverse link” searching as a citation search, eg.: link:www.BatesInfo.com — works best for very focused sites
earch full text recall.archive.org
For old DNS records, See Dialog’s Doman Names (file 225) which lists Whowas records
Poke around the site; use its site search, its search engine; use its site map; pull down all the pull down menus
Mine Yahoo groups (available as RSS)
Know the advanced search capabilities of at least three search engines:
truncation, proximity searching, case sensitivity, field searching
Use results clustering where available
Read Bates’ Tip of the Month