Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
a More In - Depth Look at Building Queries
unfortunately, this book is not a place that i can cover searching and the many types of query 
building in-depth—there's not enough room! this book focuses on the resources you use once 
you've built the perfect query. if you ind you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of building 
solid  search  queries,  check  out  one  of  my  other  books,  Web Search Garage   (Prentice-hall).  it's 
a  couple  hundred  pages  about  how  to  coax  information  out  of  search  engines  in  all  kinds  of 
different ways. You can get more information and some goodies at websearchgarage.com. 
. You're not using enough words. he way some people put queries
into search engines, you'd think they were being charged by the let-
ter. Why not use more words? Last time I checked, Google had a
query limit of 32 words. Use the limit! hrow in all the words about
your topic that occur to you.
You're not narrowing in enough. Get speciic! Don't use tree , use
dogwood . Don't use bird , use cardinal . If you have to rework your search
and get more general, that's ine. hat's the point. You're experimenting
here. Experimenting now will pay of later in saved time.
.
Of course, how much you adjust your query—how much more or less spe-
ciic you have to get—is going to depend a lot on the kind of resource you're
using. Let's get a bird's eye view of some of the diferent types of resources
you'll search so that you'll know what to expect.
Types of Search Engines
In general, two types of search engines index text-based data (multimedia
is diferent; we'll look at multimedia trapping in Chapter 8). his applies to
every kind of data that might be searched, from scientiic journals to news
stories to Web search engines.
he irst kind is the full-text search engine. Google is a good example. Full-
text search engines try to index every word on every page that they come
across. As you might expect, this amounts to a lot of words.
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