Exercise: Introducing Web Search Utilities

1. Objective
2. Some Hints in Doing this Exercise
3. Boolean Operators: Combination Keyword Searches
4. Electronic Libraries: UNCOVER
   1. Accessing UnCover
   2. Poor Searches in Uncover
   3. Refining Searches in Uncover
   4. Finding Journals and Authors in Uncover
5. Categorical Subject Searches
   1. Yahoo
   2. Look Smart
6. WWW Virtual Library
7. Boolean Operators in Yahoo: Narrowing Your Search by Using Pluses and Minuses
8. Alta Vista: Searching for Phrases
9. Internet Evaluation Assignment

I. Objective

The Internet, and the world wide web in particular, contain a vast store of information ranging from high quality research papers to very low quality materials not useful in student learning and course assignments. Many simply keyword searches produce thousands, if not millions, of hits that make it impossible to find the high quality information you desire for course assignments.

This exercise is designed to provide an introduction to some Internet tools that allow you to refine your searches so that you can efficiently find exactly what you are looking for, while excluding much poor quality material. As such, this exercise will be extremely useful for getting you started on the Internet Evaluation Assignment which is worth 10% of your final grade.

We have provided you with a hard copy of this lab exercise. However, you should also access the electronic copy in order to quickly click on links to web sites rather than typing out their long and complex addresses. You can obtain access to this document by opening up your Netscape or Internet Explorer browser, and typing in the location window the following web address: http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/Inquiry/Exercises/exwebsearch.htm (it is caps sensitive).

II. Some Hints in Doing this Exercise:

1. Online Help. Every search utility has online help. Learn to check them frequently. Print them out and keep them beside your computer, if you wish. They will help to make your searches more efficient.
2. Differences in Databases. No two databases are the same. Each has different information, data, and records in it. Some, like Yahoo and Look Smart, are organized by Categories, then by Web Sites, then by Web pages; others (like Alta Vista) are organized only by web pages , documents, or files. This means that initially you start out with more "hits" in Alta Vista than you do in Yahoo. Some (like Lycos) have a single search interface, but others (like Alta Vista) have both simple and advanced search interfaces. (For more on this, see http://www.iwaynet.net/~lsci/Search/tablevt.htm or http://www.irn.pdx.edu/~kiernan/se_chart.html)
3. Differences in Search Routines: Although there is some comparability, each search engine has somewhat different commands for searching. Check out the article by Terry Gray, "How to Search the Web," for a comparison of commands between web engines. For a more succint version, see: http://www.unn.ac.uk/features.htm. Since the commands you use in each search utility often differ, you should learn to check the online help often to ensure you are entering the correct commands.
4. Where to Start? Learn to find some high quality indexes as jumping off or starting points when searching the Internet for research materials. Here are some recommended starting points:
   • Close to home, you cannot go wrong by using the Faculty of Social Sciences Resources Page as your home page. Click on: http://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/socscir.htm. It lists the major web search engines, WebUncover, some reference tools, the major general indexes and libraries in the social sciences; indexes to refereed journal articles in electronic format; and discipline-specific indexes, such as in anthropology, sociology, kinesiology, social work, psychology, political science, economics, business, labour studies, etc.
   • The WWW Virtual Libraries are a rich source of research indexes maintained voluntarily by academics around the world. They are specialists in their field. The alphabetical listing of the WWW Virtual Libraries is at: http://www.vlib.org/AlphaVL.html ; its Subject Listing is at: http://www.vlib.org/ ; those in the social sciences are at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/socsci/
   • A good starting place are the academic journals. But you have to be careful! Some of the journals are actually electronic magazines (e-zines) whose articles are not independently refereed by experts before publication; some only list article titles and abstracts; and some require a fee for access. But there is a growing number of free academic refereed journals that provide online full-text articles which you can download. There is an index to indexes of electronic journals and magazines at: http://gort.ucsd.edu/ejourn/jdir.html. There are many listings of Social Sciences journals. One such listing can be found at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/socsci/ejournal.htm

III. Boolean Operators: Combination Keyword Searches

You can fine-tune keyword searches by using what has been called boolean operators. "Named after the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, Boolean logic is a form of algebra in which all values are reduced to either TRUE or FALSE."

For an excellent graphical representation of Boolean Logic on the Internet,
see: http://www.albany.edu/library/internet/boolean.html . (Refer to the separate 9-page handout here, "Boolean Searching on the Internet"). Boolean Logic is useful for specifying the presence and absence of certain conditions in keyword searches, hence their truth or falsity. The most common ones shared by many seach engines are the following:

• AND : if you search for "representation" and "other", both words must be present anywhere in a web site or page for a 'hit' to occur.
• Plus sign (+) is the same as AND. e.g. +representation +other
• OR : if you search for "representation" or "other", either one or both words can be present in a web site or page for a 'hit' to occur.
• Absence of any connective: (e.g., representation other ) . This often stands for OR ; but the practice is not universal, and sometimes means AND, as in WebUncover. This is called an "implied boolean logic".
• NOT specifies a condition which is absent or not true; ie, false. e.g., representaton not other would give us hits in which the word representation is present and other is absent.
• Minus sign (-) is the same as NOT. e.g. representation -other
• NEAR: (~) finds words that are close to one another. e.g. representation near blind. The number of words between the two words searched for varies by the search engine. In Alta Vista, it is 10 words.
• Combining Boolean Operators: Boolean operators can be used in combination in complex searches. E.g. if we want to find documents that combine racism with either age or sex, we would use (age or sex) and racism ; this would find pages that combine age with racism or sex with racism.

IV. Electronic Libraries: UNCOVER

By now you have finished library Exercises # 1 and #2, and have a good idea how to find material in Mills Memorial Library by using Morris and WinSpirs.

If you have not already done so, open up Netscape or Internet Explorer. Make sure you have passed the Web Proxy barrier. As a test, type in: http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~rfrankli/hatedir.htm . Make sure you can access this site. If you are interested in issues of hate and racism on the Internet, you might want to copy this URL to a new file on a diskette in your A: drive.

There are rich electronic libraries on the world wide web maintained by professional librarians. One is called Uncover. "UnCover is a database of current article information taken from well over 18,000 multidisciplinary journals. UnCover contains brief descriptive information for over 8,800,000 articles which have appeared since Fall 1988." It gives you the titles, author, publication year, volume, issue, and page information of journal ariticles. In some cases, abstracts of the articles are provided. You can copy and paste this information into your wordprocessed files, or e-mail the citations to yourself or to someone elese.

A. Accessing UnCover

To access UncoverWeb now, go to: http://uncweb.carl.org:80/ . You should see a screen that looks like this:

Login to "search uncover" on the upper left of your screen (as shown above).

Click on "search uncover now" on the right hand side of your screen (you can ignore the request for profile number and password).

If you are looking for articles on the theme of ISS3, you might start by looking for 'representation of the other'. One way do do this is the following:

B. Poor Searches in Uncover

Click on the keyword radial button. Type in and search for search for "representation". Your input screen should look something like this:

2. What is the problem with this search command? Your output should look something like the window below:

The above search produced 9,727 articles ! with the word 'representation' in the title, journal title, or abstract. This is not very useful!!

C. Refining Searches in Uncover

Click on the back button or scroll to the bottom of the screen. Now search for representation other (in Uncover, juxtaposed words are treated as joined by 'and'; this is called "implied Boolean logic", which was reviewed above in the supplementary 9-page handout). How many hits did you get this time? (You should have about 64 hits). Why did you get fewer hits than in #2 above? (Because you narrowed the search in using implicitly the boolean operator "and" which means that you searched only for those articles that had BOTH representation AND other in their titles, abstracts, or names of journals).

Scroll through the seven pages of articles (by clicking on the Next button). Find and list three articles that you consider might be useful for this course, especially if they are on the topic of your research paper.

For example, if you go to the fifth page, you might find citation 47 (Ashe, Marie, The "Bad Mother" In Law and Literature: A Problem of Representation. Hastings Law Journal. APR 01 1992 v 43 n 4 1017 ) and citation 49 (Larochelle, Gilbert, Image and Representation of the Other: North America Views South America. Diogenes; a quarterly publication of the Intern 1992 n 157 23 ). These are shown below. They seem related to our course.

Click on their titles to see the full citations. Some of these articles are on reserve under SSC 1SS3 in Mills Library.

D. Finding Journals and Authors in Uncover

If you are interested in a particular journal which you think may have a lot of articles on your research topic, you can go directly to that journal in Uncover, and browse or scroll through the titles of articles in each issue. Here's how you do it.

1. Since images and representations occur in the realm of culture, you might be interested in browsing journals on culture, such as Cultural Studies.
2. Click "new search' at the bottom of your screen, and then the "Journal Title Browse Radial", also at the bottom of your screen.
3. Type Cultural Studies in the search window, and click on the Search Button, or hit your return key.
4. You should see about 10 journals. Now click on "Cultural Studies" which should be at the top of your list. You should see a Full Journal Record Page that looks something like this:
   
   
   
   
5. On the left of your screen above, you will see a number of buttons. Click on "Journal Issues". This will take you to an issue-by-issue listing of Cultural Studies, starting with the most recent.
6. Click on the 'Next. bottom at the bottom of your screen, and then click Vol 7, No. 3, October, 1993 (about the 21st item).
7. You know from your other research that Stuart Hall is a well reknown scholar on culture, so you click on his article, "Culture, Community, Nation",at the top of the listing, as in the following screen:
   
   
   
   
8. You may want to get the article, out of the library since that looks like a seminal piece. How can you tell? It is the lead (first) article in the Issue, and it is by a famous scholar.
9. You notice that the name Stuart Hall is hotlinked. This means that there are other articles by him in the Uncover database, either in Cultural Studies, or in one of the many other journals in this massive database.
10. Given that he is an expert on the topic of culture and identities, click on his name. You now see how many articles written by him? (About 34) Copy and paste to your wordprocessed file in on your floppy diskette in Drive A: those citations which you think might be valuable for this course. (Alternatively you can e-mail the citations to yourself by clicking on the "Email this citation" button at the left, as in the following screen:
    
    
    
    
11. If you get lost along the way, you can click on the "Review Search History" button at the left to jump quickly to one of your finds out of the last 10 or so.

Principle: Besides keyword and subject searches in Uncover, you can also browse journal issues, and get articles by authors whose names are cross-referenced between journals. This is one way to do research: you begin with a topic, get an author who has published on that topic, then see if that author has published other articles on the same or related topics.

Procedure: After you copy and paste your article citations you found in Uncover, you can check to see if the journals in which the articles were found are available in Mills Library by either using Morris on the Web, and by usng the more powerful version of Morris within the library (remember your Library Workshop, Session # 1). You can also use WinSpirs (WebSpirs) from the web as long as your are on campus. You log into to: http://webspirs1.mcmaster.ca:8590/

V. Categorical Subject Searches

Some search engines have organized web sites and pages by subject categories similar to subject classifications in the library. We have listed some of them at the top of the Faculty of Social Sciences Resources Pages, and distinguished from them search engines that use keyword searches. Sometimes the same search engine will do both. Take a look at: http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/socscir.htm

You saw subject classification systems in Library Session # 1 in Mills when you looked at Morris. There is no standard subject classification system on the Internet like the Library of Congress system, though there are some projects underway to develop one. Instead, a number of web search companies have developed their own subject classification systems. If you stick to the academic ones, like the WWW Virtual Library, (http://www.vlib.org/) you will get more academically-oriented topics and divisons. Commercial ones are likely to emphasize divisions that are popular, or which reflect the market. For example, compare the follow subject classification systems: Yahoo, and Look Smart.

V - A. Yahoo

Yahoo is a commercial company that developed a very popular subject classification system at: http://www.yahoo.com/ . At the bottom right hand part of your screen, click on "Society and Culture", a topic that should be relevant to this course. You will see two columns of more specific sub-headings, a motley of academic and popular issues, as in the following screen:

• One good starting point in the early stages of an essay is to look for indexes and directories. You will see one on this page called "web directories". Click it on. You will get the screen below:
  
  
  
  
• One of the experiences of looking through the Internet is that one is never sure what one will stumble upon. There may be some titles on this page that offend you. Yet here we find a link with the Culture - WWW Virtual Libraries. This often happens on the Internet. We get the good, bad and ugly thrown together. Our critical thinking task as researchers is to pick out the good stuff.
• If we are interested in issues of racism, then click on the Hate Directory link. You should get the screen below.
  
  
  
  
• Scroll down to see the index of resources. Here you will find the large index to all sorts of hate groups on the Internet, which may be useful to you if you are going to discuss in your paper issues of negative stereotyping of specific groups.
• Click on the Back Button twice, then click on Culture and Groups. Here, in the following screen, you will see a veritable cross-section of 12,251 web pages on pop culture, all the way from Breatharians (fat free) to Rivetheads (industrial subcultures). If you are interested in gay issues, you might click on and explore the many subheadings under Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals. If you are interested in representation of self and others on the Internet, you should pursue the Cyberculture link. If you are interested in images of age, and generations, pursue the Seniors link, or the 50-Somethings. The point of these subject headings is that you can explore the hierarchy down to the level where you arrive at specific web pages, and then make a decision as to the usefulness of the information.
  
  
  

V - B. Look Smart

Look Smart is a commercial web search engine at: http://www.looksmart.com/ . You will notice that it has a different graphical interface, and has some different but also some similar subject categories as Yahoo. It has different ways of going down the hierarchy of subject headings -- ie, horizontally across the page, as follows:

• One of the consequences of negative stereotyping is a violation of the human rights of The Other. This is usually depicted in the society realm. So, if you were pursuing this topic, you might scroll down to the bottom under "Library", and click on "Society", then "International Affairs". You should get the screen below:
  
  
• Now, click on "Human Rights". You should get a listing of human rights resources around the world, such as 'Amnesty International', 'UN and Status of Women', and 'Canadian Action for Indonesia and East Timor'.
  
• If you were interested in issues of Women and Body Images, you might click on the back button on Netscape or Internet Explorer until you find "Society", then "Gender & Sexuality", then "Issues and Rights", then click on Body Image where you will find resources on Eating Disorders, Media Influences, Anorexia, Breast Implants, JellyRolls, etc.
  

General Principle: General to Specific: You explore your subject area for your research paper by going from more general categories to more specific ones, until you arrive at textual documents. This is not that different from working in a physical library. The main difference is that the "commercial virtual libraries" are likely to be more chaotic, and to have a greater amount of "junk material". To get higher quality material, and in greater density, we turn to the WWW Virtual Libaries.

VI. WWW Virtual Library

The WWW Virtual Library classification system is at: http://vlib.org/, and looks like this:

At first glance, this top level subject classification may look similar to the commercial ones. But the differences quickly disappear as you click down through the hierarchy subject disciplines. The WWW Virtual Libraries are maintained voluntarily by academics in their specialized areas of expertise rather than by corporations attempting to make money from their information. A good place to go would be to click on Society, then the Social Sciences. There, rather than popular or market oriented headings, you will find more traditional academic headings, like Anthroplogy, Migration and Ethic Relations, Regional Studies, Sociology, and Women's Studies.

If you click on Sociology, you get access to a gateway of specialized global resources in Sociology. This site for the world is maintained here at McMaster University, and looks like the following:

Click the back button on your browser three times. At the bottom of the WWW Virtual Library page, you can also click on the Alphabetical Listing to get a more detailed listing of all the main subject areas in the Library maintained by academics around the world, as follows:

VII. Boolean Operators in Yahoo: Narrowing Your Search by Using Pluses and Minuses

Let's try some Boolean Operators in searches that might be of interest to you. We will use start with Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com/. This will be a be a bit tricky, so you have to ensure that you pay attention to the finer details.

1. We may want to begin by searching for +representation +of +the +other. Make sure you put a space between each word. But do not put a space between the plus sign and the word. This is the same as putting the boolean "and" between each word. Here is what it should look like. You cannot see all of "other", but you can type it all in.
   
   
   
   All these words must be present to get a hit. Try it. What did you get? You should have gotten about 32 hits. There are several things you should notice:
   • Along the top of the page, you should have "Categories", "Web Sites", "Web Pages", "Related Stories", "Net Events". These are the categories in which Yahoo organizes its information. You should notice that "Categories" is not hot linked. There were no hits at the upper-most categories. You should have (1-20) of 32 Web Site matches. This means that the first 20 of 32 are shown on the first screen. The top of your screen should look like this:
     
     
     
     
   • If you look down the list, are there some that don't fit in well with the topic of the course. For example, you might think that the "Companies" headings do not fit in well, and wish to eliminate them. So revise your search by putting a minus sign in front of companies, like this:+representation +of +the +other -companies (you will have to go the the right side of the input window, and type -companies there). Your input screen on the right should look like the following. Drag your mouse over the screen below to see the entire input that you should be typing on your computer.
     
     
     
     
     How many site matches did you get? You should have reduced them from 32 previously to about 26 now. This is due to the elimination of those web sites with companies in their titles or identifying text (usually the first few lines of a web site, or "meta tags", which you do not have to worry about).
   • You notice that there are a lot of sites with "proportional representation"in them. But you are not interested in this kind of political representation. So eliminate "proportional" by putting a minus sign in front of it, like this: +representation +of +the +other -companies -proportional . Your input screen should look like this (drag your mouse over the window to expand the input window that you should have inputted on your computer.)
     
     
     
     You should now have eliminated three more site matches; you should now be down to 23 site matches.
   • You next notice that there are a number of matches that have "government", "business", and "financial" in them. Since you think these do not deal with the pure issues of"representation of the other", you decide to eliminate those sites with the following new search:
     • +representation +of +the +other -companies -proportional -business -government -financial . The right side of your input window should look like this: (move your mouse over the screen below to see the entire input that you should be typing)
       
       
   • You now should be down to about 6 site matches from an original 32.
     • Two sites appear to be the same: They have the following text: "University of Massachusetts at Amherst focuses on the representation of identities to provide an account of how historic alienations of identity and negotiations of difference have defined international relations." When you investigate this site, you realize that you have stumbled upon an entire theory course on representation of the other in the international arena, with a number of suggested readings. This could be useful if you are doing your research paper on the international political aspects of self/other (see also the reading on Reserve in Mills under 1SS3 on representation of the otherby the Trilaterial Commission in the Latin America context).
     • One site appears to deal with music, which may not be what you are looking for.
     • Look for the three matches called "Romancing the Indian" . Check it out. They deal with sentimentalizing and demonizing the Indian in the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. Your screen should look like this:
       
       

VIII. Alta Vista: Searching for Phrases

The Alta Vista search engine has recently been revised so that it looks for keywords on specific pages as well as doing searches by categories. It is also divided between simple searches and advanced searches.

You can start Alta Vista by clicking on the following: http://www.altavista.digital.com/, and get the screen below. This is the simple search page by default. Like other search engines, Alta Vista will allow you to do single keyword searches. But, as we saw in the case of Yahoo, they result in too many 'hits'.

There are many ways we can fine tune a search by working with phrases, or combinations of keywords that must occur together in an exact sequence. For example, "I love inquiry courses" (a phrase) would result in fewer hits than +I +love +inquiry +courses . Why? Because the former is a phrase enclosed by double quotations that will give you hits that have the sequence I love inquiry courses (it gives you ONE HIT, to this web exercise you are currently doing, which is now in the Alta Vista database on the Internet), while the latter will give you hits as long as each wordappears somewhere in the web site or page, which is far less restrictive. It gives you 1,978 hits!

1. Please access the Alta Vista online help by clicking the Help keyword on the upper right hand part of the screen. (if you have lost your way, go directly to: http://www.altavista.com/av/content/help.htm) . The two most important sections are Main Search and Advanced Search. You should be on the Main Search Page. Scroll down and click on What is a Phrase?. Read the material about how to enter a phrase with (double) quotation marks. Now let's try it out.
2. Let's say that you were presented with the following passage, and were told to find it on the Internet. You were assured that it exists somewhere on the Web.

   “If you're interested in making an impact on your staff, students, managers or employees in the areas of cross cultural relations, diversity, empowerment, team building, the use and abuse of power, ethics, or sexual harassment then you've come to the right web site."

3. We could try the easiest way of finding this page by searching for a single keyword. Click on "search" at the top to bring you back to the Alta Vista home page. (Again, if you have lost your way, go directly to: http://altavista.digital.com/ . Let's try power .Enter this in the Alta Vista Search search window. How many hits did you get? You should have got about 8,776,009 Web pages!. This did not get you very far.
4. Try the Alta Vista option of searching for a phrase. This should increase our chance of finding the web page with this passage than if we use a single keyword.
5. Try finding a phrase as an alternative to the single keyword "power", such as "cross cultural relations" (make sure you use the double quotation marks). How many hits did you get now? If you got approximately 676 hits, you did this correctly. This is better than using the single keyword power, but the result is still fairly useless. You do not want to scroll through more than 50 screens to find the correct one.
6. The trick is to find a keyword or phrase that is fairly unique on the Internet. That is, one which rarely occurs, or occurs just in a few sites or on a few pages. This would increase our chance of finding the correct URL. The best practice is to try a few phrases from the passage above until you find one that is efficient in terms of getting only a few hits easy to scroll through.
7. Look at the above passage again. Try "diversity, empowerment, team building,". This might be more unique than "cross cultural relations". How many hits did you now get? You should have got four (4). Rather than clicking on each hit, you can read the beginning of the text under each Title. Look at the second hit. It mentions BaFa BaFa. If you check this out, you will see that it is a web site constructed by the company that develops and markets BaFa Bafa.
8. When you get a page hit in a search engine like Alta Vista, it is often linked to a series of related web pages. If you think such page hits are useful for your research, you should try to explore these related pages, or an index somewhere in its web site giving links to other similar resources on the Internet.
9. In the URL you just found, you will find a number of hot links at the bottom, as in the following screen, called an index, table of contents, or site map:
   
   
   
   
   • Click on the hotlink for "articles". When you get to the Articles web page, you will find a hot link to four different articles on BaFa and simulations. If you are looking for an article about the educational value to students and instructors of simulations, click on the hyperlink entitled, "Inventory of Hunches About Simulation games". When you bring this article up on your screen, you will see that in it Hall T. Sprague speculates about 10 educational uses of BaFa. This article might be useful in helping you understand why your instructors decided to use the BaFa simulation in the Inquiry course. You may want to copy and paste the URLs and titles of the this article to a wordprocessed file on your floppy diskette in Drive A: of your computer, and take it home with you. It shows that way in which an intelligent use of a unique phrase can lead you to a useful resource on the internet with as little effort as possible.

The topic of Web Search Engines is a vast one to such an extent that Yahoo has an entire index listing more than 160 different web search engines at http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searching_the_Web/Search_Engines/
It is not necessary to investigate search engines in such detail. But one should know the more common and useful boolean operators and search commands to get by. We have not had time to cover all of them in this exercise. In particular, you might want to examine the online help of the main search engines to find out how you can restrict your searches to web titles, URLs, periods of time, etc.

IX. Internet Evaluation Assignment

Now, you have some free time to find a high quality and a poor quality web site for your Internet Evaluation Exercise (woth 10% of the course grade). We suggest that you click on the following web address to bring up on screen an electronic copy of the Assignment: http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/Inquiry/neteval.htm (you were given a hard copy in class).

To help you in this Assignment, you might also want to consult the electronic copy of Some Internet Resources: Representation of the Other at http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/Inquiry/otheres2.htm which you were also given a copy in class.

This ends the lab exercise. Good luck in evaluation Internet Content and finding exactly what you are looking in as efficient manner as possible.

© Copyright Carl Cuneo Last Revision: February 4th, 2000