WORLD WIDE WEB RESEARCH

WORLD WIDE WEB RESEARCH.

This summary will look at methods of making WWW searches more effective, and in doing so, I will demonstrate the strategy I used on a working example from 'Victorian Studies'.

Using the web to answer essay questions is now the trendy thing to do. Science Magazine (1998) gives an estimated 320 million pages available on the WWW. However lazy students will get a surprise if they think they can find answers to all their problems easily; they can't.. There is however a much easier way to obtain the information you need. McBride (1966) promotes the use of simple 'Boolean Expressions' to instruct the search engine to not only be selective in its search, but also to disregard the 1000s of web pages that just contain utter drivel, and of no relevance to the search criteria. Using the 'Simpsons' as an example in this table :-

Keyword.	Example.	Action.
AND	Homer AND Simpson	Finds all documents with Homer and the word Simpson.
OR	Homer OR Simpson	Finds all documents with at least one of the words or phrases.
NOT	Homer AND NOT Simpson	Excludes documents containing at least one of the words/phrases. Finds documents With Homer but not containing Simpson
NEAR	Homer NEAR Simpson	Finds documents containing both specified word/phrases within 10 words of each other. (would find nursery rhyme but exclude a religious subject.
ADJ	Car ADJ race	All pages with the two words next to each. Ie car race, or race car etc.
WILDCARDS	Homer*	Will retrieve variants, ie home, homer etc.

OTHER METHODS.

Double Quotation Marks. - You can link words and phrases together to give a single word search power. ie. "poverty in the 19^th century". This will only show pages with these words in the exact sequence as shown. This is by far the easiest way in simple searches to get to the main titles you probably need, (but you must of course know the correct sequence.).

Other Joiners:- Dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes (used to join URLs) can also be used. ie poverty-19^th-century, or (poverty in 19^th century) This method can be confusing, and is best avoided in your earlier attempts to find subjects.

Including/Excluding Words:- To make sure that a word is always included in your search, add a (+) before the key word. (ie poverty in +19^th +century. Etc) Similarly, you can exclude a word by adding a (-) before the keyword in the search word.. (ie. compare python with python -monty, if you like snakes, but not humour).

Tutorial Aids.

There are many tutorials available on the world wide web that can assist a beginner in learning about the web and its idiosyncrasies. Hadley (1995) uses the following list from 'Yahoo' and offers these URLs for some of the better tutorials

URLs.	Notes.
www.townsquare.means.net/tutorials/search/index.html	My favourite tutorial with lots of features, easy to use.
www.198.110.10.57./chem/researchtutorial/session1.html	Good, lessons broken into 7 easy steps.
www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/finding/sink.htm	Superb tutorial with British site. Every possible help.
www.northernwebs.com/bc	Tutorials for web surfing.
www.home.sprynet.com/sprynet/meander101	For first time users.
www.geocities.com/athens/4565	Danny's new users tutorial.
www.ou.edu/research/electron/internet.html	Introductory tutorial on internet.
www.sierramm.com/smpnet.html	Desktop presentation of the internet.
www.ccnet.com/~yuval/hopstick.html	Search engine information.
www.x25.net/~dwindham.html	Online internet tuition.
www.primelab.physics.purdue.edu/web/p152/internet.html	Internet for beginners.
www.zrhome.com/iwc	Internet tutorials
www.massnetworks.org/~nicoley/tutorial/index..html	Introduction to the Internet.
www.sils.umich.edu/~fprefect/inet.html	Introduction to the net.
www.learnthenet.com	Learning the net.
www.screen.com/start/guide/default.html	300 references for beginners.
www.hcs.harvard.edu/~calvarez/newuser.html	Web starting pointers.
www.ug.cs.dal.ca/pub/newbie.html	Using the net.
www.members.aol.com/bikerchris/main.html	Novice's guide to the net
www.provide.net/~bfield/polaris/index.html	Beginners guide to web & Usenet.
www.portinfo.com/faq	Getting started on the web.

A drawback to using web pages for an essay, is that most pages have no checkable sources, (and no ISBN), also they are often the unfounded viewpoints of the disenchanted. Finally, the internet is a series of databases compiled by professional companies using 'trawl engines', therefore it is not being searched 'live', as it exists at this very moment. This means you should repeat your searches on a weekly basis to upgrade your perceived needs.

Multi-threaded Search Engines.

These search engines scan through the search engines of others providers and are really superb and strongly recommended. I use the following two :-

Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com)

Profusion (http://profusion.com) New address

REFERENCES.

Handley,M. (1995) Beneath The Surf - The WWW, (UCL Press, London, )p 104

McBride,P. (1966) Internet Resources.(Reed Press, Oxford, )p 39

Science Magazine (1998) Internet Pages. (Printers unknown)

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Crumlish,C. Internet for Busy People. (Mcgraw-Hill. New York. 1996)

Handley,M. Beneath The Surf - The WWW, (UCL Press, London, 1995)

Kennedy,J. Rough Guide to the Internet. (Cox & Wyman, Reading, 1997).

Kennington,S. Internet Explorer. (Reed Press, Oxford,1997)

Levine,J. Dummies Internet. 3^rd Ed.(IDG Books, Chicago, 1996)

Levine,J. Unix 3^rd Ed. (IDG Books, Chicago.1998)

McBride,P. Internet Resources.(Reed Press, Oxford, 1966)

Which PLC. Guide to the Internet (Which PLC, London 1998)

ADDENUM :-

WORKING EXAMPLE.

To the question 'Did the Working Man Aspire to the Victorian Values of the Aristocracy, whilst in Poverty', one could enter the words 'Working Man, 'Victorian Values', and 'Poverty into the 'Yahoo' search engine. The answers would be:-

Working Man (Men) 1,788,734 web pages.

Victorian Values. 327,150 web pages.

Poverty. 22,257 web pages.

This makes over 2 million pages to read.

Obviously this is ridiculous and very time consuming. Therefore in my search for the essay question, 'Did the Working Man Aspire to the Victorian Values of the Aristocracy, whilst in Poverty' I was able to reduce from over 2 million pages down to:-

"Working_Man" AND NOT gay 2,181 web pages.

(Victorian Values) 122 web pages

"Poverty" AND NOT poor 245 web pages

It could not be reduced much further, as there were no pages that contained all the operands, it therefore had to be split into the three main groups, but using this method actually showed up what I wanted in the first 100 pages. (only 6 screen fulls). I do not like nesting the whole question because the slightest deviation can either throw up irrelevant pages, or even miss out important references. Using 'Working Man' threw up 1000s of 'gay' pages, hence the need for more filtering to remove these 'gay pages'.