How to improve your online searches

Google is a good place to start an online information quest and can provide much more information than many realize. But the number of other sources is almost endless. Here are some tips on improving your searches, starting with Google.

GETTING THE MOST OUT OF GOOGLE

Google allows you to limit searches so they provide information that's most relevant to your quest. For example, typing "intitle:" before your keywords will retrieve only pages with your search terms in the Web page's title.

You can also narrow your search to a particular Web site or to a particular domain, such as higher-education or government sites. To search only the Library of Congress site, for example, type "site:loc.gov" alongside your search terms, and you'll get back only Library of Congress pages relating to your query. To find your subject on higher-education sites only, type "site:edu" alongside your search terms.

SEARCHING BEYOND GOOGLE

Some search sites are especially good for certain kinds of searches. For example, a search at www.USA.gov will return U.S. government-sponsored information. A search at www.scirus.com will turn up scientific material only, including journal articles and individual scientists' Web pages.

To find basic historical information, such as what year the Civil War began or what Marie Curie was famous for, historians at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media are developing H-Bot, an artificial intelligence program that sifts through information from many sites to arrive at the most likely right answer to such questions. Check out H-Bot at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/h-bot. Although it can't yet answer "how, where, or why" questions, it claims around 95 percent accuracy for birth or death years of famous people, and brief biographies of famous people with relatively unique names, and 60 percent to 80 percent accuracy on simple historical questions like "Who discovered oxygen?"

Interested in what's going on around the world? Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org), a project of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, aggregates the work of bloggers and other citizen journalists around the globe to paint a daily picture of world events that goes beyond what mainstream American media publish.

To search worldwide, pull up Search Engine Colossus (www.searchenginecolossus.com) to find an international directory of country-specific search sites and other online resources for countries and territories from Aaland to Zimbabwe, in English and many other languages.

Oyez, at www.oyez.org, is a multimedia Supreme Court site where you can read the latest news and information on cases from 1793 to the present, listen to recordings of recent oral arguments and take a virtual tour of the Supreme Court building.