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Tutorial Navigation
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Managing Your "Bookmarks" or
"Favorites"
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| Browser Preference Setting for Netscape
and Internet Explorer |
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Understanding How Search Engines
and Directories Work
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Developing Your Internet Searching
Strategy
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Hands-on Searching Using Major
Search Engines, Directories,
and Telnet
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Steve at
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with any questions or
suggestions you may have about the material in this tutorial.
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Using Excite
Excite
is a full text Web searcher designed for natural language searching
of the Web as well as thousands of newsgroups, claiming to have the largest
database of any of the Web search tools. One of the key features
which makes Excite such a popular search engine is its use of statistical
techniques in the assessment of relevance. It looks not only at the
number
of times which words occur in documents, but also at where they
occur relative to one another and their position in the document.
The most notable feature of Excite is its
concept-based design. This means that it not only searches for the
exact words specified in the query, it also expands the search to look
for closely linked words. Excite's Help document cites this example:
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"Suppose you enter elderly people financial
concerns in the query box. In addition to finding sites containing
those exact words, the spider will find sites mentioning the economic status
of retired people and the financial concerns of senior citizens."
A Simple
Search can be expressed in normal language. Go to Excite's home
page and perform a simple search for either of the following sets of
terms. Record the number of hits.
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recommended calcium intake
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or try
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inventory management software for foodservice
More complex
searching can also be performed through the Power Search option.
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Use the pulldown menus on the various fields
of the Power Search form to build Boolean-style searching queries.
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Click on the "Click here to add more constraints"
button if you need additional fields to build more complex queries.
Go to Excite's Power
Search page and perform a search using any of the following suggested
queries, or any other topics of interest to you. Record the number
of hits.
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Beside the words, "My search results MUST
contain", select
the words using the pulldown menu for the first
field, and type
dietary recommended intake calcium in the next field
where search terms are entered. Compare the results with those attained
in the next suggested query, which looks for documents containing the phrasedietary
recommended intake.
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Beside the words, "My search results MUST
contain", select
the words using the pulldown menu for the first
field, and type
calcium. Next, click on the button reading
"Click here to add more constraints", and in the additional line added,
select MUST contain in the field beside the words "My search results",
and select
the phrase in the next field. Type dietary recommended
intake in the field where search terms are entered.
or try
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Beside the words, "My search results MUST
contain", select
the words using the pulldown menu for the first
field, and type
foodservice software. Next, click on the button
reading "Click here to add more constraints", and in the additional line
added, select
MUST contain
in the field beside the words "My search
results", and select the phrase in the next field. Type inventory
management in the field where search terms are entered.
An additional feature of the Excite search
engine is the fact that it recognizes words as names when they have their
first letters capitalized. Excite will search for documents where
the terms are next to each other:
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