A presentation given to the 11th Annual Conference of the British-Irish Parliamentary Reporting Association giving tips and advice on searching the internet more efficiently and effectively

1. Internet Research
BIPRA Conference 2013
Susan Mansfield

2. Overview
By the end of this session you should be able
to:
 Search the internet faster
 Search the internet more effectively
 Get better results from your internet
searches

3. Should I use a search engine?
 Get familiar with a few good sources
 Bookmark these
– Shared bookmarks?
 Be aware of commercial websites

4. Which search engine to choose?
• Google
• Yahoo Search
• Bing
Keyword
• Yahoo Directory
• Exalead
Index
Directory
Category
• Mamma
• ForelookMeta
• http://www.philb.com/webse.htm
List of
search
engines

5. Specialist Search Engines
• www.acronymfinder.com (human edited)
• www.abbreviations.com
Abbreviations and
acronyms
• http://www.synonyms.net
Synonyms and
antonyms
• http://www.definitions.net
Definitions and
translations
• http://www.phrases.net
Phrases and
idioms
• http://www.quotes.net
Quotes and
sayings
• http://www.lyrics.netMusic and lyrics
• http://greatpdf.comPDFs and ebooks
• www.taforum.org.uk
Associations and
organisations

7. How do search engines
work
 Robots and spiders
 Author registration
 Ranking
– Is word in title element/page heading/URL
– How often does word appear (as a percentage of total words)
– How close are the words to each other

8. The case against Google
 Results vary (.com or .co.uk?)
 Bits are broken
 Personalisation
 Wikipedia
 Google is an advertising company

9. Basic Google searching
 Start broad and narrow down by adding
keywords
 Don’t use too many words
 Use words that the website will use
 Beware - Google can go its own way

10. Search operators
 Basic search
– Smoking packaging
 Search for an exact word or phrase
– “seize the day”
 Exclude a word (can also be used for a site)
– restrictive covenant -employment
– restrictive covenant -site:wikipedia.org
 Include a word
– +Smyth
 Include a "blank“ for unknown word(s)
– “Sawbridgeworth * Women’s Institute”
– “Sawbridgeworth * * Institute”

11. More search operators
 Search for either word
– “civil partnership” OR marriage
 Synonyms
– ~marriage
 Nesting and compound searches
– (“domestic partnership” OR marriage) -“Proposition 8”
~legislation California

12. Advanced Google searching
 Proximity
– Sawbridgeworth AROUND(3) Institute
 Search within a site or domain
 marriage site:scottish.parliament.uk
 marriage site:.parliament.uk
 Marriage site:.uk

13. Filtering by content type
 Web
 Images
 Maps
 Videos
 News
 Shopping
 Books
 Places
 Blogs
 Flights
 Discussions
 Recipes
 Applications
 Patents

14. Filtering by search tools
 Publish date
 Reading level
 Verbatim search
 Images
 Dictionary tool
 Personal
 Nearby
 Visited pages/Not yet
visited
 Pages from a particular
country

15. Handy Lookups in Google
 Definitions
– define:suffice
 Clock
– time Vancouver
– sunrise Vancouver
– sunset Vancouver
 Weather
– weather Vancouver
– weather (current
location)
 Flight information
– TS297
 Conversions
– 4 inches in mm
– £100 in Canadian currency
– 42 in Roman numerals
 Calculations
– 14*42/12+2-11
– cos etc.

16. Getting help
 susan.mansfield@scottish.parliament.uk
 www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html