Dr.

Acheampong
UGBS 303: COMPUTER Owusu
APPLICATIONS IN MANAGEMENT PhD(Malaysia),
MSc(UK),
BSc(Ghana)
 Course Evaluation

Marks allocation
• Class Attendance - 10%
• IA - 20%
• Final Exams - 70%
Total - 100%

Office : GBS10, UGBS Main Campus

Graduate Research Assistants:

Fred and Obed
Advanced Web Search
Dr. Acheampong Owusu
 What you’ll Learn

■ Introduction to search engines

■ Truncation, Quotation Marks and Wild Cards
■ Search operators
■ Creating search statements
■ Advanced search features
■ Limiting searches by date, language or document type
■ “Today’s take away”
 How search Engines Work

• To most people, Internet search engines refer to World Wide

Web search engines

• Before the World Wide Web became the most visible part of
the Internet, there were already search engines in place to
help people find information on the Internet.

• Some of the popular names at the time were like "gopher"

and "Archie“. In the late 1980s, getting serious value from the
Internet meant knowing how to use gopher, Archie, Veronica
and the rest.

• Today, most Internet users limit their searches to the World

Wide Web (simply the Web)
 Other services of the Internet Besides the Web

Chat - IRC (Internet Relay Chat) for live discussions on the Internet.
E-mail - Exchanging electronic letters, messages, and small files.
FTP - File Transfer Protocol is the most common method of transferring files
between computers via the Internet.
Hosting - Making information available to others on the Internet.
Mailing Lists - E-mail messages forwarded to everyone on a special interest list.
Search Engines - These tools are really a part of the World Wide Web and are
often used when looking for information because the Web has grown so large
and is without any inherent organizational structure.
Telnet - Creation of a dumb terminal session to a host computer in order to run
software applications on the host system.
Usenet - Newsgroups for receiving news and sending out announcements.
World Wide Web - This is largest, fastest growing, part of the Internet, the part
for which Internet browsers like Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Explorer
were designed.
 Web Search

Spider Web
Google is a website that uses the spider web method
in order to accurately find websites that you are
interested in...............
Advanced Search Techniques
Advanced search options are a set of very useful
features offered by most search
engines and search tools on the Web. Advanced
search gives the Web searcher the ability to narrow
their searches by a series of different filters; i.e.,
language, proximity, domain, etc
Multimedia Searching
Multimedia Searching such as videos, pictures, and
how to use someone’s media legally..........
 How search Engines Work

• A search engine tells you where a file or document can be

found. But first, the file must be located.
• Search engines use special software robots known as spiders to
build lists of the words found on millions of Web pages.
• When a spider is building its lists of words, the process is
referred to as Web crawling.
• The usual starting points for the spiders are heavily used
servers and very popular pages. The spider begins with a
popular site and indexes the words on its pages and through
every link found within the website.
• Spiders first look for words in the title, subtitles, meta tags and
other positions of relative importance for special consideration
during a user search.
• The Google spider was designed to index every significant word
on a page, leaving out the articles "a," "an" and "the“. Other
spiders like AltaVista take different approaches.
 Data Centers

All our online activities including web

searches are made possible by data
centers around the world
 Basic Searching

Narrowing Searches
only use words that are key words to help
narrow the number of searches......................

Don’t type long Sentences

USE KEY WORDS....................

Use sites based upon what you are looking

for
If you are looking for videos, use youtube, if you are looking for
images use images.google.com
 Truncation and Quotation Marks

• The two most helpful advanced search

techniques are:
1) Quotation Marks
2) Truncation or Wild Card
 Quotation Marks

•Quotation marks are used around phrases.

By using quotations marks, you are telling the
computer to only bring back pages with the
terms you typed in the exact order you typed
them.
• Example:
• “health care reform”
• instead of
• health AND care AND reform
 Quotation Marks

For example, if you are interested in finding

information on social networking, it is best to
search for “social networking” in quotation
marks. Otherwise, the computer might search
for social AND networking and find many more
irrelevant results.
 Adding a Minus

• Adding minuses to a specific word tells

the search engine not to search for sites
related to that word. ..........................

For example, I am interested in finding

information on social networking, I can add
words that I do not want the search engine to
include in the search.
E.g.: social media networking -Twitter
 Truncation and Wild Card symbols

• These are used to widen search results. This ensures you don't miss
relevant records.
Most databases are not intelligent - they just search for exactly what
you type in. Truncation and wild card symbols enable you to overcome
this limitation. These symbols can be substituted for letters to retrieve
variant spellings and word endings.
• A wild card symbol replaces a single letter - useful to retrieve
alternative spellings and simple plurals
e.g. wom?n will find woman or women
• A truncation symbol retrieves any number of letters - useful to find
different word endings based on the root of a word.
E.g. africa* will find africa, african, africans, africaans
e.g. agricultur* will find agriculture, agricultural, agriculturalist
 Truncation and Wild Card symbols

Truncation means to chop off. When you

truncate you chop off the end of the word,
so the computer can search for multiple
endings.
For example, if your research question
includes the keyword education. You can
truncate education, so that the computer
will find all of the word ending variations.
Educat* will find:

Education
Educate
Educated
Educating
etc.
 Truncation - Hint

Be careful where you place the truncation

symbol. Educate* will not find education or
educating, although it will find educate and
educated.

Truncation will not find synonyms (i.e. scien*

will not find the words botany, biology, or
astronomy), although it may bring up articles
on those topics IF they include the words
science, scientific, or scientist.
 Search Operators - Boolean

• Also known as Boolean operators, search operators allow

you to include multiple words and concepts in your
searches.
• AND retrieves records containing both words.
• E.g. Finance and Accounting
• It narrows your search. Some databases automatically
connect keywords with AND
• OR retrieves records containing either word. It broadens
your search. You can use this to include synonyms in your
search. E.g. marketing or advertising
• NOT retrieves your first word but excludes the second.
 Advanced Searching Techniques (tips and Shortcuts)

Quotation Marks
Quotation marks will search for the exact phrase
that was typed..............

Adding a Minus
Adding minuses to a specific word tells the search
engine to not search for sites related to that word.
..........................

Boolean Words
AND, OR, and NOT are all Boolean words that
allow someone to refine their search and are “AND”
powerful words for searching...................
“OR”
“NOT”
 Searching by date or language

• Many databases allow you to limit your search in

various ways. Limits are usually available on
advanced search screens, or you can apply them after
doing your keyword search.
• Examples of the types of limits you can apply include:
-by date
-by language
-by publication type (eg journal articles, chapters
in books, review articles that provide detailed
summaries of research, book reviews)
Searching by File Types

.doc/.docx
file extension .doc/.docx will take you to all websites that
come from or are documents............................

.pdf
file extension .pdf will take you to all websites that are
portable document format (PDF)...........................

.ppt/.pptx
file extension .ppt/.pptx will take you to all websites that
are or contain a Power Point...........................
.gov
file extension .gov will take you to all websites that are
government websites.......

.gov
Searching by File Types - Examples

.doc/.docx
e.g.: site:domainname.com filetype:docx
.pdf
e.g.: site:www.ug.edu.gh filetype:pdf

.ppt/.pptx
e.g.: Web tutorials filetype:pptx
.gov
e.g.: Ghana government filetype:gov

.gov
Other Advanced Search Operators

AllIntext
This operator will help you find whether all the terms that you are looking for
shows up in the text of that page. This operator, however, isn’t pin-accurate
because it won’t look for text on the page that appears close together.
e.g. university of ghana allintext:accomodation
Intext
This operator is a more global operator that allows you to find any terms
showing up on a webpage in any area – like the title, the page itself, the
URL, and elsewhere.
e.g. university of ghana intext:accomodation
Allintitle
This search operator is a great way to find blogs that match the content you
are writing about. For example, you could use allintitle to research what
others are doing for that particular topic. Then, you could write your post to
be better than theirs.
e.g. allintitle:banku and okro
Other Advanced Search Operators

Intitle
This is a narrower operator that will help you find more targeted results for
specific search phrases. If you wanted to find pages that are all about
“banku and okro” for example, the following is how you would use it:
e.g. intitle:banku and okro
Allinurl
This one allows you to find pages with your requested search terms within
the URL in internal search pages. For example, say you wanted to perform
research on pages on a site that had the terms “banku and okro”. You would
use the following:
e.g. allinurl:banku and okro
Inurl
If you wanted to find pages on a site that has your targeted search term in
the URL, and the second term in content on a website, you could use this
operator.
e.g. inurl:banku and okro
Other Advanced Search Operators

site
This is used to search for a specific site. To locate a specific site, put “site:” in front of a
site or domain.
e.g. site:youtube.com or site:.gov.
related
This is used to search for related sites. To search for related sites, put “related:” in front of a
web address you already know.
e.g. related:banku and okro

info
This is used to get details of a site. To get details about a site, put “info:” in front of the site
address.
e.g. info:www.ug.edu.gh
cached
This is used to see Google’s cached version of a site. To get google cached version of a
site, put “cached:” in front of the site address.
e.g. cached:www.ug.edu.gh
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly
literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines
and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions,
from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories,
universities and other web sites.
Multi Media Search Techniques

Search by voice
Google Voice Search or Search by Voice is a Google product that
allows users to use Google Search by speaking on a mobile phone
or computer, i.e. have the device search for data upon entering
information ...
Legally Using Pictures or Videos
People who own multi media files have creative common licenses.
This means they can let us use their media or not. All Rights
Reserved, meaning we must get permission from the owners to
use the Media................

Google Images
You can use a picture as your search to find related images from around the web.
 Advanced Search
• To enter the Google Advanced Search page,
type the url below:
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
 Advanced Search

Through this page, you can do some of the filtering explained

earlier by typing the required text in the textboxes and
clicking on “Advanced Search” button

A click on the “Advanced Search” button without

typing anything brings the webpage on next slide.
 Advanced Search

Here, one can search in some A click on the “I’m Feeling

local languages as shown Lucky” button displays the
under Google offered in:… Google Doodle Archives page
 Conclusion

More Reliable Searching

narrowing searches can get better more reliable sites when
working on projects or papers..............

Less Time Wasted

narrowing searches can take time away from searching when
working on projects or papers...........................
“Today’s take away”

NEXT WEEK – MS_EXCEL