Optimising search

This is a key to the exercise Optimising Search in Search Engines Part 1.

Search engines tweak their algorithms constantly. Search and ranking algorithms also change from one engine to another. What works well in one might not work at all in another. Yet, there are some common rules that can help optimise search in most cases.

It is better to avoid single word search queries. One good rule of thumb is to include the context – what you are looking to do with the search. But then, too many words might not return a result, or return results that are not relevant: Try and describe what you want in a few key nouns. It is a good idea to omit words that are too general.

Search is an iterative process. You will need to reframe the question based on what works.

Here is an example from the British Journal of Educational Technology of a student using search iteratively:
“Nomusa’s improved command of academic discourse in the target area allowed her to formulate the following sequence of queries:

• sustainable building material  (sees nothing interesting in list of  results)
• sustainable livelihoods (explores two search results)
• sustainable livelihoods building materials (finds a target source)

Employing this type of sequence is a common strategy among experienced web searchers who generally rely on repeated queries with slight variations in the query terms¹.

To understand how artificial Intelligence is used in Search engines, artificial intelligence in search engines, artificial intelligence used in search engines etc should work.

• Quotation marks force the search engine to look for exact matches for the terms inside them. Results of baked cheese recipes might include cheesecake recipes while “baked cheese” recipes will avoid that confusion. “East German” stories will show results with both East and German and this should be evident by comparing from the number of pages of search results for both “East German” stories and East German stories.
• Search engines ignore punctuation except ‘ and ” (as discussed above and to show ownership).
• near shows what is nearby a given location. near me will give results applicable for current location of the device. restaurants near eiffel tower is one possible way to look for a place to eat if you are visiting the Eiffel Tower.
• A minus symbol followed immediately by a word will exclude pages with that word. Multiple words can be combined within “”. artificial intelligence -“machine learning” will show results that mention artificial intelligence but without machine learning.
• x AND y looks for results that have both x and y. x OR y shows results that have x or y or both x and y. Note that both AND and OR are in caps.”When you want results that include two specific synonymous or closely related words, use the OR operator. For example: direct marketing consultant OR expert. This will combine the results for two phrases: direct marketing consultant and direct marketing expert“².
• * can take the place of an unknown word. university of * California results will include university of southern California while university of California will not do that, at least in the first few pages
• site:bbc.com restricts results to what is found in the website bbc.com.  courses site:*.edu returns results for all sites which end in .edu (educational institutions). While looking for scholarly articles, it is a good idea to look in specific sites like springer.com, scholar.google.com etc.”Searching for academic research papers is much more efficient if you use one of the scholarly information collections, rather than just searching on the global, open web. This selection of a resource to search is a kind of search scoping needed to include the appropriate kind of result. The information space isn’t smooth, but has distinct structure. The more you know about that structure, the more effective you can be as a searcher³.”
• filetype:pdf or filetype:jpg etc returns links which are a pdf document or a jpg image.

¹ Walton, M., Archer, A., The Web and information literacy: scaffolding the use ofweb sources in a project-based curriculum, British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol 35 No 2, 2004.

² Spencer, S., Google Power Search: The Essential Guide to Finding Anything Online With Google, Koshkonong, Kindle Edition.

³ Russell, D., What Do You Need to Know to Use a Search Engine? Why We Still Need to Teach Research Skills, AI Magazine, 36(4), 2015.