untangling_the_web

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Tip 19: Use Wildcards to Maximize Effectiveness
I love to use wildcards in searching. Unfortunately, few search engines permit
wildcard searches, which means the researcher must enter the term in a variety of
forms for a thorough search. Here is how the major search engines handle
wildcards.
Google: one limited wildcard (*); can only replace any single term with white
space on either side (e.g., ["what a * web"] will find "what a tangled web" and
"what a coiled web"). Cannot be used within or at the end of a search term (for
example, to pluralize a term).
Yahoo: Yahoo does not support wildcard searching. The old cheat of using a
"small" word, such as a, no longer works in Yahoo.
Live Search: no truncation, no wildcard. A search for [cat] finds cat, not cats.
Exalead: a search on [child*] return pages with children highlighted as a search
result. The wildcard also can be used inside a search term, e.g., [kazak*stan].
This search accurately finds kazakhstan, kazakh, and kazak as well as kazakstan.
Tip 20: Examine Page Source Code
In addition to often revealing the webpage's language encoding, page source can
provide other helpful details, including names, dates, email addresses, type of
software used to create the page, etc. However, experienced webpage designers
have learned by now that putting these sorts of details into the source code is an
open invitation to spammers to harvest them, so finding useful bits of information in
source code is less likely now than in the past. Still, many people are not
experienced Internet users and have not yet learned to keep this information out of
the source code, so it is worth a look. Below is a very good example of how
analyzing page source code helped one company track down the person responsible
for a fabricated television interview that spread potentially libelous information about
the company. The page source contained an email address that ultimately led to the
person responsible for the false information.
Daniel Janal, "How to Deal with Lies About Your Company (and You) on the
Internet," Scambusters.org http://www.scambusters.org/Scambusters29.html
Tip 21: Ask for Help
One of the hardest questions to answer is, "how do you know when you aren't
finding something because you're not searching correctly or because it's not there to
find?" The best rule of thumb I can think of is to ask a more experienced Internet
researcher for advice and assistance if you are hitting a brick wall. Experienced
researchers generally have developed a pretty good sense of where to look for
different kinds of information and, most importantly, the types of information you are
not likely to find on the Internet.
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