Effective Searching: Links
Boolean Operators
The Beginners Guide to Boolean Search Terms
- The context is recruitment and hiring but this might be a good gentle introduction into combining Boolean search terms
Boolean Operators: Pirates vs Ninjas
- Short video introducing the three basic Boolean operators (disappointingly, there is no fighting between pirates and ninjas)
EBSCO: Searching with Boolean Operators
- EBSCO is a library resource vendor. This is their help section on using Boolean operators, and will give you an idea of how Boolean operators work in a resource.
Search Engines
Bing
- Bing is Microsoft's search engine and is the most popular search engine after Google. Bing's results bring up more images and videos than Google and has a customisable homepage.
Yahoo
- Yahoo is one of the oldest search engines still going and is the third most used search engine today. Yahoo is more a web portal than a search engine, providing access to news, weather, trends, and horoscopes(!). It's not perhaps as user friendly as other search engines however.
DuckDuckGo
- If you're concerned about privacy and want to avoid being tracked by search engines, then use DuckDuckGo, which does not track its users at all. DuckDuckGo has a nice interface too, but perhaps its search results are not as good as other search engines.
Wolfram Alpha
- Wolfram Alpha is more of an answer engine than a search engine. It won't provide links to pages, but will provide results based on facts and data it finds from searching the web. For example instead of providing web pages in response to the query "battle of Waterloo", Wolfram Alpha will give you the date, location, participants and casualties. For other queries, the results page will show you dates, statistics, images, graphs and all sorts of other relevant things according to what you searched for.
Dogpile
- Confused about what search engine to use? Why not search several at once! Dogpile is a metasearch engine; a fancy way of saying a search engines that searches other search engines and brings back the results from all of them, removing the duplicates first. It's a great idea, but who uses different search engines these days?
The Internet Archive - Wayback Machine
- The web is great, but it's also very "here today gone tomorrow" a lot of the time; content disappears from the web all the time and once it's gone it's gone. The Internet Archive provides free access to collections of digitised materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of public-domain books and is a great resource in of itself. It also run a web archive. Its Wayback Machine takes snapshots of websites; hundreds of billions of them and archives them for posterity. If you want to know for example what was on the RTE website on 18th January 2001 , this is the site for you. Obviously not every page from every site from every day is there, but its good for seeing webpages as they once were and finding content that has been removed from the web.
Million Short
- Use Million Short to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine result ranking for whatever reason.
Niche Search Engines
- This article has a listing of some niche search engines, designed to find very specific types of content
Search Tips
20 Google Search Tips to Use Google More Efficiently
- Some really useful tips and tricks to improve your Google searching
37 Advanced Google Search Tips for Smarter Searching
- 20 Google tips not enough? Have 37 (though numbers 34-37 aren't search tips)!
Plan Your Search
- Use this downloadable template to think about how to build your search