Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Spotlight

Searching the WWW, page 2

Example: When looking for ray tracing procedures, if you do something fairly generic like:
computer science
algorithms

you'll pretty much get 20,000 hits, none of which are what you wanted. A good way to tune your search is to use fairly uncommon words that are peculiar to what you're trying to find.
Instead, try:
ray tracing algorithms
computer graphics

It doesn't hurt to add extra bits of relevant information. For instance, I happen to know that Andrew Glassner wrote a book that includes ray-tracing algorithms. So my first attempt might be:

ray tracing algorithms
computer graphics
Andrew Glassner

The more search terms you can specify, usually the
better the search. Choose terms that are associated with
the target of your search and are not frequently used
elsewhere.

Use advanced searches in Web indexes.¹ . If you use the various Web search engines like everyone else, you prob ably open up the front page of www.AltaVista.com or www.HotBot.com, type in a few words, hit the "search" button, and hope for the best.

But you needn't use quite so blunt an instrument. Most search engines (and all that are any good) offer advanced search capabilities. The biggest problem in using the advanced features is that every engine has its own peculiarities. Some have Boolean searches; some have interesting capabilities that others don't. How do you keep track of all these details?

In a nutshell: Use a cheat sheet. There's too much stuff to remember, and all the slight variants are kind of a pain. The cheat sheet I use for the search services I currently believe are best is printed later in this article.

In practice, I keep my bookmarks file open, and I've got each search engine entry tagged with the appropriate set of notes. My cheat sheet is usually hidden back in a rear window someplace.

Note that both my bookmarks and the notes page for the search engine are open. On a large format display, this works fine.

Continue

¹ Yes, I know the plural of "index" should be "indices". But that looks like a delicacy from the Caribbean, not the plural form of the word. Besides, the voice of popular culture has doomed such niceties, along with Latin plural forms such as "fora" for "forum" and feminine forms like "aviatrix" for the neuter "aviator." Lovely words, if you can still find them.