Cover 1_rto4 - Illuminating Engineering Society

Brian Cronin,
Director of
Business
Development,
Planetmouse,
Inc.
Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t
know what I am doing.
—Wernher von Braun
Istumbled upon an online article describing a research
study called The Consumer Daily Question Study. (If
you want more information on this study, conducted
by Lewis, Mobilio & Associates, on behalf of Keen.com,
check out: www.keen.com/documents/corpinfo/
pressstudy.asp). This study monitored about a hundred
people over the course of a week and found Americans
generate an average of four new questions every day.
Participants spent nearly nine hours per week (online
WORKING
WITH THE WEB
and off) looking for the answers. The primary resource
was the Internet, followed by Friends & Family; Sales &
Service Providers; Medical Professionals & Therapists;
and Magazines. Surprisingly, several traditional sources
— libraries, TV news, encyclopedias, dictionaries and
maps — were tapped less often than in the past.
Business Contacts came in dead last; so much for trusting
your peers.
Information access is a discovery process that will
continue to evolve. Time is essential in finding answers,
as is effort. But it is efficiency, the impact of both time
and effort, that determines the course of action. We
want our information faster and with less energy expended.
Until time travel or human cloning become commonplace
in the work environment, improving the informationgathering
process must focus on the source. Increased
efficiency hinges on improving access and the Internet is
an obvious choice for fast, efficient data gathering.
Conducting Research Online
Web-based research is a fast, painless process. The
three most commonly used online research tools are:
search engines, directories and metacrawlers.
Search Engines are one of the most popular research
tools on the web. They direct users, based on
specific topics, to the web pages that best suit them.
The user punches in a request and the search engine
automatically responds by or “crawling” the web to
compile a relevant list of websites.
• Lycos began as a search engine, depending on listings
that came from spidering the web. Today, it uses a
directory model similar to Yahoo. Lycos (www.lycos.
com) also owns and runs HotBot (www.hotbot.com),
another popular search engine.
• Excite is one of the most popular online search services.
It offers a large index and integrates non-web
material such as company information and current
events into its results. Excite also owns and runs
Magellan and WebCrawler as separate search services
(www.excite.com).
• AltaVista is one of the largest search engines on the
web, in terms of pages indexed. It offers extensive coverage
and a wide range of search commands, making it
a favorite among researchers (www.altavista.com).
• AOL Search offers two search services: one for its
members and one with general web access for nonmembers.
This ‘external’ site (http://search.aol.com)
does not list the AOL content available to its members.
• Google is a search engine that uses link popularity
to rank websites. The more links to a site, the higher
the ranking. Yahoo supplements its results with those
from Google (www.google.com).
Directories, a little different than search engines, are
often included under this grouping. A directory depends
on human input for its listings. Individual websites submit
a short description to the directory for the entire site
or the directory editors create one for sites they review.
A directory search looks for matches only in these
descriptions. A well-designed site with quality content is
more likely to be reviewed than a poor site.
• Yahoo is the web’s heavyweight search service
champ. Its reputation for helping people find information
quickly and easily is well-earned. Yahoo is the
largest human-compiled guide online, employing hundreds
of editors to help categorize the web. Launched
in 1994, Yahoo is also the oldest major website directory
(www.yahoo.com).
• LookSmart is another qualitative or human-compiled
directory of websites. It also provides directory
results to MSN Search, Excite and many other search
engines, in addition to being a stand-alone service
(www.looksmart.com).
Metacrawlers function a bit differently than search
engines and directories do. Rather than searching the
web and building their own listings for each request,
metacrawlers conduct a search on multiple sites all at
once and then provides the compiled results. So, the
user gets the best of multiple search engines and directories,
rather than just one source. Metacrawler examples
include: Go2Net /MetaCrawler (www.go2net.
com/index.html); Mamma (www.mamma.com); and
Dogpile (www.dogpile.com).
Garbage in – garbage out
The quality of the answer often depends on the quality
of the question. Web-based research is no different. The
key is knowing how to request information quickly and
efficiently. Here are some basic tips for searching online
(for the sake of time and efficiency, the term “search
engine” also covers directories and metacrawlers
Using + and -: You can instruct search engines to
find web pages that must contain or exclude specific
words and phrases. For example, if you want to list the
top web pages containing both the words ‘dog’ and
‘retriever,’ enter +dog +retriever into the search field. If
you want only web pages that contain ‘dog,’ but exclude
‘poodle,’ enter +dog –poodle.
“Double Quotes”: Most search engines also allow
you to search for exact phrases by using double quotes.
For example, if you type in ‘classic cars,’ you will receive
a list of pages that contain classic and/or cars. However,
if you search for “classic cars,” your search will
18 LD+A/May 2001 www.iesna.org