23

Effective searching takes precision. This section shows you how to perform several steps to make your searching more precise—you’ll turn up more sources that are useful to you and perhaps, sources that may be even crucial to your research question.

You’ve probably been searching in a more casual way for years. For example, have you been searching by literally typing complete questions into the search box of Google, Bing, or other search engine? For example, “What is the population of Timbuktu?”

This type of search, where you literally ask the question you are thinking, is called natural language searching, which means you are using the “natural” human way of communicating by constructing a question another human would understand.

What does doing this imply? It implies several things:

• There is a “person” somewhere who is looking up an answer and answering your question, or
• You think the design of the internet is logical and operates in the same way humans communicate, or
• You lack understanding of how results are retrieved when searching,
• ?

Natural language searching is a rudimentary way of searching that is inefficient and reflects a lack of understanding on the searcher’s end. Search engines are run by algorithms that human beings create using coded language. A search engine does not “read” or “understand” what the searcher is seeking. All it recognizes is that something has been typed into the search box, and its task is to send out bots to search for the occurrence of the important (concept words, key terms, etc.) in the inputted question only. So, in the example above, the algorithm looks only for population Timbuktu because these are the important words in the search box.

Keep in mind that as quickly as you get your results by doing this search, a search engine is doing the work of finding the occurrence of your key terms over millions of searchable pages. So, imagine how much longer and less efficient it would be for it to search for every single word in your question.

You are wondering: Ok, I hear you, but how does it know which words are important to search? Well, it doesn’t. What it does know (or more literally, programmed to identify) are the words that aren’t important, and if you think of it this way, there are a lot fewer unimportant words than there are important words.

Think about it this way: words that are rich with meaning, what in the English language we denote as nouns, are those words that reflect either a concrete or abstract idea. So in our example,

“What is the population of Timbuktu?”

Which do you think are the important, meaningful words? It is, coincidentally, the highlighted terms. If you remove everything else in the question and leave only these two words: population Timbuktu, the core of the meaning of the question is still there without all of the “helping” words surrounding it like “what is the..of”, which without the two key terms (population Timbuktu) , wouldn’t mean anything. So, this is what the search engine is doing, eliminating the noise and unnecessary pieces and homing in on only the important words. This is what the search engine does each time, home in on the important terms for the purpose of efficiency. That’s why when two important words together might have alternative meanings, you end up with a results list that contains what you deem irrelevant results. You, as the searcher, still need to make sense of the results and determine which result is right for you.

By the way, there is a term for these unimportant terms. They are called stop words, the unimportant words that a search engine algorithm avoids when looking for matches to your important terms.

You may wonder: Ok, but is going to the trouble of precision searching actually worth it?

Yes, definitely, for searches that are important to you! You’re in competition with many people who are working to be as skilled as they can be. Use these steps on course assignments and for information tasks you do on the job.  With lower stakes searches, precision searching may be less important.

Search Strategy

This information on precision searching is based on how search tools such as Google and subscription databases operate. If you’ve been more casual in your searching practices, some of these steps may be new to you.

Starting with a research question helps you figure out precisely what you’re looking for. Begin with search terms (also known as key terms directly from your research question); these are the “important” main concepts in your research question and then identify similar terms/synonyms for the original terms in order to broaden your search. Those search terms need to be arranged in the most effective way as search statements, which you actually type into a search box.

Searching is an iterative process: we try search statements, take a look at what we find and, if the results aren’t good enough, edit our search statements and search again—often multiple times. Most of the time, the first statements we try are not the best, even though Google or another search tool we’re using may give us many results.

It pays to search further for the sources that will help you the most. Be picky.

Here are the steps for an effective search.