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Your ability to find the information you seek on the Internet is a function of how precise your queries are and how effectively you use search services. Poor queries return poor results; good queries return great results. Contrary to the hype surrounding "intelligent agents" and "artificial intelligence," the fact remains that search results are only as good as the query you pose and how you search. There is no silver bullet.
Most Internet searchers, perhaps including you, tend to use only one or two words in a query. Big mistake! Also, there are very effective ways to "structure" a query and use special operators to target the results you seek. Absent these techniques, you will spend endless hours looking at useless documents that do not contain the information you want. Or you will give up in frustration after search-click-download-reviewing long lists of documents before you find what you want. All of us need information. But few of us have studied information or library science, and not everyone has used search services or Internet search engines sufficiently to learn all of the nuances. This tutorial is for those who are learning the ropes about 'power searching.' But, even if you're quite experienced in these areas, you might find some benefit from glancing through these topics. This tutorial is organized to proceed from the basics to more advanced topics. It is divided into two sections: "Searching with Internet Provided Resources" and "Using a Powerful Desktop Resource — Mata Hari®". The first section has 12 parts containing 51 topics and describes the search services, available operators, and the extremely important information on how to compose your queries. The second section contains 11 topics and describes using our tool: Mata Hari — which we believe is the most powerful search tool ever developed. As heavy duty searchers ourselves, we had to create Mata Hari to automate and expedite the search process for our own needs. A description of its features and how it works is provided for your own assessment of whether or not you can benefit from this powerful tool. Simple to follow examples are presented in each topic. We've written it to be a one-stop reference. Don't feel you need to work through all of the topics in one sitting. But, if you do take the time to work through this material, we guarantee you'll reap big dividends in faster and more accurate results. And, you will be on your way to earning the title of an Internet "Power Searcher." You can also download this tutorial in hardcopy:
Download this tutorial as a zipped MS Word 6.0 document (143 kb) Proceed Immediately to Tutorial Index Documentation is appended at the end of [1,2]; click on a number citation reference to go directly to it. Executive Summary: The Two-Minute Bottom Line To illustrate some of the basic concepts and recommendations covered in this tutorial, let's say we have an interest in recent findings about new planets being discovered outside our solar system. Using the information "contained" in this statement, you can see how an effective query can be built by following these guidelines. We'll summarize the recommendation, show how the statement is phrased, describe why it's important, and provide a pointer to the specific topic number in the tutorial that covers this recommendation. At the conclusion of the table are the topics and their titles listed by number. |
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By issuing the query in #9 above to AltaVista, we are able to restrict results from a baseline of 917,754 documents using the query new AND planet (actually 1,139,837 if we were to properly include planets as well) to a count of 2,036 documents [1]. Though that number still seems like a lot, we have reduced our possible universe of results by 400 to 600 times, and four of the first five documents listed give us exactly what we were looking for:
http://www.got.net/~seasons/new.html Go ahead; try these queries for yourself! The ultimate bottom line to getting the best results for your queries is to search multiple services simultaneously using a universal format. Our solution is to provide you full Internet searching power at your desktop via the Mata Hari® product [Section 2]. Do you want to be able to get such impressive results for your own queries? Then, welcome. It's now time to start the tutorial. Or, if a given topic is of more interest to you, click on these topic headings to proceed to them directly: |
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