Trial
and Error
If
the first few sites in a set of search results prove
unhelpful, use these sites to reconsider your search
terms. They may very well indicate that you need different
search terms, or you need to broaden or narrow them,
or that you need to put them in context. In other words,
you may have to do multiple searches before you get the
results you are looking for.
In addition, when you check results, go beyond the first few documents. Because
of the way search engines rank documents for relevance, you may have to look
well beyond the first few hits to find what you really want.
Consider
Ranking
Search engines differ in the
ways they rank results. Many give a higher ranking to sites
that contain the search terms in the URL, headline, and first
few paragraphs. In others, the more frequently a search term
appears in a document the more relevant to a search it is judged
to be. Others rank a document more relevant if the search terms
appear close together. These considerations are known as on-the-page
rankings.
Other
search engines employ off-the-page rankings
to determine relevance. A document may be given high relevance
if there are many links to it from pages ranked high by the search
engine. Google ranks
a page by the number of pages that link to it, so the more frequently
a document is linked to, the better it is considered to be.
Some companies pay search engines for high placement on a results
list.
Change
Search Engines
If several searches using
one search engine produce unsatisfactory results, try another.
No two search engines have the same collection of Web pages, so
another search engine might produce a better set of results.
