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Many of the services included in the "Searching the Internet" section of the Scout Toolkit utilize various search engines, each with distinct features and capabilities. In most cases instructions for using the search engine are included somewhere at the site, and we have included the location of the instructions when available. However, the instruction for each search engine may contain unfamiliar terms that relate to specific functions. For your convenience we have defined six common functions below. Note that not all search engines provide all the functions defined. For a summary of the functions availalble for each search engine, see the Internet Scout Sidekicks.
Boolean Searching: Allows terms to be put into logical groups by the use of connective terms. For example, cats AND dogs narrows a search. Cats OR dogs broadens a search. Cats NOT dogs narrows a search. Each service explains its connective terms for Boolean searching in its help or FAQ file. Note that some systems are defaulted to a certain connective term without the use of that term. In other words, in some cases cats dogs is treated as cats OR dogs.
Field Searching: Web pages are made up of many parts, including title, URL, text of the page, links from the page, images on the page, etc. Some search engines allow these fields to be searched. Combining these field searches in one search can help the user to greatly increase the relevance of the retrieved items, as well as allow for searching for specific information such as how many other pages link to a certain page.
Key word in context (KWIC): These searches will return the key word and N words near the key word to give the user the context in which the key word was found.
Phrase Searching: Allows searching of phrases when available. Note that some systems can be confusing if you think that "Scout Report" is searching the two words together as a phrase, when in fact the engine is searching Scout OR Report.
Proximity Searching: Allows searching of one term within N words of another term, narrowing the search.
Relevance Feedback:Attempts to measure how closely the retrieval matches the query, usually in quantitative terms between 0 and 100 or 0 and 1,000.
Truncation Searching: Allows searching on different word endings or plurals with the use of a truncation wild card symbol. For example, if the truncation symbol is *, then the search term econ* will return items that contain economics, economy, economic, and econometric. Car* will return items that contain cars and cartoon, so it is advisable to use truncation symbols judiciously. See individual help files for the specific truncation symbol used with each engine, when available.
The search pages of the Toolkit are produced and maintained by Jack Solock and Susan Calcari.