Web search axiom
The simple truth that underlies and explains a lot about web search is that a search engine finds web pages with your keywords in them, and returns a list of links to those web pages.
Or, to put it another way, words that you type in the search box must be in the web pages the search engine finds for you. It's so obvious that it's easily overlooked. Knowing this helps, among other things, to identify the right keywords.
Based on that theory, there are three types of web search.
- Spontaneous typing in of keywords and hitting the Search button, without much consideration. That's what we usually do. It can be called "quick search", or "simple search", or whatever.
- In some cases we cannot find what we need by just typing in any words. We start to think and fish out keywords and phrases from our subconscious. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's like any kind of activity without conscious guidance. Interestingly, even knowledge and use of advanced search operators does not give the searcher the feeling of accomplishment. We can call it "uneducated search", or "search without consideration".
- Complex search, as in 2 above, but (a) with understanding of relationships between keywords and web pages and (b) with the implementation of all means provided by the search engine, such as supported search operators or other features, to translate your combinations of keywords into search queries. This is "educated search".
A few points deserve immediate attention. Click in the left panel for details.
- Keywords. Even image search depends on words. Until Semantic Web becomes semantic, we are stuck with plain keywords.
- Web pages. Every search ends up with a web page. This is where the information is. Web pages have structure, and some other features, that can be used to greatly improve the quality of our searches.
- URL's. Every web page has a unique i (URL). The i may have words in it that will direct our search to the web page.
Know thy friends
In essence, the Web consists of websites, websites consist of web pages, web pages consist mostly of text.
Information we need is on web pages and we find them by words. This is a crucial point: all our web searching is about finding web pages containing our keywords. Even in the so-called "subject search" we remain slaves to keywords.
We cannot ruminate on the relationship between keywords and concepts here. Assuming that everyone knows it, at least unconsciously, we can focus on the technical side of searching the web.
Web search is based on keywords. So, the first thing we need to know is what keywords are and how they function in web pages. This is covered in Know thy friends section. Second, we need to know how to use a search engine to find web pages with our keywords. This is covered in Advaned Google search and in other parts of this Use Simulator.
Three views of keywords help understand the basics of web search.
- Keyword - how words in a text become search keywords.
- Web page - how location of keywords in different parts of a web page influences web search.
- Envisioned result - how to create an imaginary model of a web page with keywords in place.
Once you know these three things, you can build a query describing the "model" of the web pages you need, using the capabilities of a search engine, in our case those of Google.
Next, hit the Search button, and let the search engine fetch you a list of links to web pages, each of which will match the model. You can make your query more targeted by adding detail to the model - using more keywords and phrases and specifying where they should be located in the web page.
What a web searcher should know about the addresses of web pages, a.k.a. their URL's
The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the i to a source of information on the Internet. It can be seen in the location bar of a Web browser. The URL has four distinct parts, the protocol type, the host machine name, the directory path on that machine, and the file name. Each URL taken as a whole, that is from the protocol down to the file name, is unique on the Internet. For example, this is the URL of Ballet Dictionary at American Ballet Theatre website:
Comments
| Protocol: http | this part of the URL indicates that the document is unique to the World Wide Web |
| Domain name: www.abt.org | top-level domain name: org second-level domain name: abt |
| Document path: /education/dictionary/ | directory or path of the document, indicates where on the machine the document is located. Similar to folders in the Windows. |
| Document: index.html | name of the file with the web page code. |