Cable Cars to the Stars
Let's perform an online search using three popular search engines--Yahoo!,
Google, and Ask.com--so you can see how they work and how you can develop
an efficient search strategy.
Here's the challenge: You're planning a trip to San Francisco and you've
always wanted to ride a cable car. Do they operate in January and if so, what's the schedule?
First
we'll try Yahoo! One trick when searching is to narrow your focus. Entering
"San Francisco" in the search box results in over 403 million sites
related to the City by the Bay! Entering "cable cars" results
in 92 million sites, many of which have nothing to do with San Francisco. By combing
the terms ("San Francisco cable cars"), The search still returns over 10 million
sites, along with a brief description of each one. Now you have to visit
each site to see if there's any information about cable car schedules. Fortunately, the first three sites listed all contain information pertinent to our search.
Now
let's try using Google, an index-based search engine. Once again, enter
"San Francisco cable cars" in the search box. The Google search
results in over 1.5 million documents that match the search terms. Life is
too short to comb through all these. The reason for this enormous list
is that Google turns up every document that contains the words "San,"
"Francisco," "cable," and "cars."
To search for documents that contain
just this phrase, use quotation marks around the terms ("San Francisco
cable cars"). Doing this results in about 46,000 documents. Fortunately,
Google smartly ranks sites in order of relevancy and popularity, so the first few have information about schedules.
But even better, try entering "San Francisco cable car schedule". Bingo! Now the list includes just 10 sites. As you can see, the more specific you can be with your search query, the more focused the results.
Ask.com uses a technology called natural
language query, a fancy way of saying that you can ask your question
in plain English. By typing a question like "What is the San Francisco
cable car schedule?" you get a list of related pages. Once again, you will have to go to the site, but in this case, it's a no-brainer as one of the choices is "San Francisco Municipal Railway."
Bear in mind that websites tend to change often. These changes are not
always reflected in the search engine database, particularly for directories.
Typically, websites are registered with search engines when they first
go online. After that, changes are not reported generally. To find the
most recent information, your best bet is a search engine that use Web-indexing
robots, software that constantly search the Internet, recording additions
and changes.
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