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III Many of those seeking information through Google don’t use it to maximum effect and make no attempt to improve their search techniques, or to gain a good grasp of Google’s many features, how its search engine works, and how to use the different search operators to fine tune search queries. Many users of Google could significantly improve their search efforts and track down the information they seek by learning a bit more about the many simple and advanced strategies that Google offers to narrow or broaden searching and to refine search terms. The tips and examples below, together with the checklists of the important points to bear in mind as you commence a search, will enable more effective Google Web searching, and help you find information more rapidly. This guide does not, however, cover the full range of Google’s search offerings and other features (e.g. Froogle, Google Catalogs, Google Wireless, Calculator, Glossary, or the intriguing Google Zeitgeist at http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html), but only those that are relevant for academic research and, more specifically, for research on Africa and African studies. How to search with Google & the Google Toolbar You can search with Google
You can download the Google Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows at http://www.toolbar.google.com and install it with or without its advanced features. Safari can be downloaded for free from http://www.apple.com/safari/. There is currently a petition that aims to persuade Google to make the Toolbar available for the Macintosh, see http://www.gopple.org. If you don’t want to install the Google Toolbar, or don’t use Internet Explorer or Safari and prefer other browsers, there are a number of alternative options. For example, the Mozilla Firebird browser has a built-in Googlebar http://googlebar.mozdev.org. Mozilla’s current release (version 0.8) emulates all of the basic search functionality of the Google Toolbar, allowing users to access easily almost all Google’s specialty searches from one toolbar. The Google Toolbar’s current version (August 2004) is 2.0.113. It is available in a number of languages (including Arabic, in a Beta version), see http://toolbar.google.com/?fix=en. For more information generally, visit the Google Toolbar Help pages at http://toolbar.google.com/help. The Toolbar’s advanced features give you access (i.e. extra search buttons) to other Google search services such as Google Image Search, Google Groups, Google News, the Google Directory, and the I’m feeling lucky button; and you can use its highlighting and word-finding features to quickly locate terms within the pages of the search results. A useful feature is a Search History, which lets you repeat previous recent searches without having to type the words in again. Additionally, you can use the toolbar to block pop-up windows (including those irritating pop-up ads), but you can still view any pop-ups you want to see by holding down the Control (CTRL) key, and you can tell the Google blocker to allow pop-ups from particular sites. (Safari has its own pop-up blocker, independent from the Google Toolbar.) The advanced functionality in the toolbar is optional, and by going to the Google Toolbar menu, selecting “Help”, and then selecting “Privacy Information” you can disable it by deactivating the “Page Rank Display” features. With the advanced features disabled no information about the page you are viewing will be sent to Google unless you explicitly request more information about that page (such as with the "Cached Snapshot", "Backward Links" or "Similar Pages" features). The Toolbar also displays the Google page ranking (see Google’s page ranking and indexing system), and page information features such as a “Translate this page”, which currently translates to and from six European languages (see Language tools and local Google sites in African countries below). How many of the advanced features you want to include in the Toolbar is entirely up to you, and you can set your preferences in the Toolbar Options menu. Tip: you don’t
need to move the mouse into the Google search box. Just press ALT-G (which
moves the cursor to the search box), type in your search terms, and then hit
ENTER.
Tip: if you don’t
have this feature enabled you can always make the contents of a search result
appear in a new window. If you are using Internet Explorer for Windows, hold
down the SHIFT key while clicking on the link; alternatively, open the page in
a new window by right-clicking the mouse and then select “Open in New Window”.
Other browsers have similar capabilities that are accessed with various
key/mouse combinations. Language tools and local Google sites in African countriesYou can translate foreign-language pages into English using Google’s “Translate this page” tool next to the search results. On Google’s Language Tools page at http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en you can also translate entire pages, or parts of text, written in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish into English, or vice versa. Bear in mind, though, that this is translation by machine and you can’t rely on it for accuracy. At best, it may be a passable translation; at worst, it may be only vaguely comprehensible and give you just the gist of what appears on a foreign-language Web page. Relatively short phrases or sentences translate better on the whole, single word translations work very well for the most part, but translations of entire Web sites can be more comical than accurate. Examples: The future of African studies is bright translates as: Die Zukunft der afrikanischen Studien ist hell A slightly more complex translation task, for a book title, does well too: Africans in the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development translates into Afrikaner in der industriellen Revolution in
England: Eine Studie im zwischenstaatlichen Handel und in der ökonomischen
Entwicklung For two African proverbs, one does well: Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet Nur ein Dummkopf prüft die Tiefe des Wassers mit
beiden Füssen but is rather less successful for the other When elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled A translation into German or French of the African Studies Companion home pages at http://www.africanstudiescompanion.com generates a pretty crude “translation”, but is just about comprehensible. For some reason, the quality of the “translations” seems to be marginally better when they are translated from English into other languages rather than vice versa, as these three examples of translations into English, from French, German and Italian, rather strikingly demonstrate (and it doesn’t seem to like French accents much!): Original text: Publiée par les éditions Karthala, Politique Africaine est une revue pluridisciplinaire d’analyse du politique en Afrique. Créée au début des années 1980 en rupture avec les approches dominantes, elle s’est imposée en France et à l’étranger, comme une publication de référence pour l’ensemble de la communauté “africaniste” internationale. English translation: Published by the Karthala editions, African Politique is a multi-field review d?analyse of the policy in Africa. Created at the beginning of the years 1980 in rupture with the dominant approaches, it s?est imposed in France and on l?étranger, like a publication of reference for l?ensemble of the community?africanist? international Original text: Das Institut für Afrika-Kunde widmet sich der wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung und Dokumentation der aktuellen politischen, wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen in Afrika südlich der Sahara. English translation: Institut for Africa customer dedicates itself to the scientific investigation and documentation of the current political, economic and social developments in Africa south the Sahara. Original text: Africa e Mediterraneo è un trimestrale che dal 1992 presenta dossier di approfondimento di temi legati all'economia, alla storia, alla cultura e alla società dei paesi africani. English translation: Africa and the Mediterranean are a quarterly one that give 1992 introduce dossier of deepening of topics legacies to the economy, the history, the culture and the society of the countries Africans. From Google’s Language Tools pages you can
also visit Google local domains for individual countries – for Africa,
currently (August 2004) those in Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of
the Congo, Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt, The Gambia, Lesotho, Malawi,
Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Tchad, and Uganda. Keep in mind that
if you use one of these local domains for searching, any preferences you will
have set for the main Google.com domain will not be operative, as each local
domain is configured separately. Google and foreign language characters Assuming you are using an English keyboard, and using Windows, searches in Google for terms containing special language characters such as German umlauts or French accents (diacritics) can be a bit cumbersome. Unlike in some other search engines, in Google a term with an accent does not match a term without one or vice versa. So, if you are a Windows user – Macintosh users are rather better served here, as accents are typed easily from the keyboard – you will need to copy and paste characters with accents into the search form (or enter them via the ALT key) etc., to find all relevant results. However, for the most comprehensive search, it is best to search with and without the diacritics if you want more than an exact match, or also add the OR search operator (see Using the OR operator below). Alternatively, if you are conducting a search consisting primarily of terms in, say, French and/or published in French-speaking countries, it may well be the best strategy, initially at least, to restrict your search to pages in French in Google Preferences (see Setting your preferences). At the completion of this search exercise you will need toremember to set them back to “any language” and press “Save Preferences”. Examples: développement économique Côte d’Ivoire However, sometimes the number of results can
be rather puzzling, as this example shows: For searches for organizations or
institutions, it doesn’t seem to make much difference. For example: Note: the above translation examples are indicated in upper and lower case, but Google is not case sensitive (see Important points to remember – and the dos and the don’ts below). Some general points to bear in mind
Important points to remember – and the dos and the don’ts
Other factors to consider
I’m feeling lucky searchIf you click this search method or button (which you will need to activate under Options if you are using the Google Toolbar) it will lead you to the page of the first search result, i.e. the page that Google considers most relevant. It won’t actually show a search result, but it will take you straight to the relevant home page, if a home page exists. “I’m feeling lucky” is quite useful if you know the precise name of an organization, institution, library, company or association, etc. For example, the search terms african studies association Exactly the same happens, for example, for african literature association, It is slightly different, for example for journal of modern african studies Two further examples: for university of florida libraries scarecrow press If you are fairly certain that a Web site does exist for an organization, and that the name is spelt correctly, “I’m feeling lucky” is pretty dependable on the whole. However, if a Web site does not exist, Google can also get it completely wrong, and the “I’m feeling lucky” search result can lead you to a Web site that, while containing the search words in the query, may be completely irrelevant. Unless you are sure of, and type in correctly, the officially recognized name for an organization or institution, the “I’m feeling lucky” option is not usually a good route. For example, for university of ibadan ibadan university Another example: Want to go straight to the top? Entering the words president south africa president sierra leone president kenya Advanced Search & Google search operators Below I set out some of the many Google search operators and how they work. However, it is not really essential to learn them by heart. All you need to do is to click on to Google’s Advanced Search page. This brings up a form with drop-down menu choices for most types of advanced searches. Thus even the novice Web searcher can perform quite complex searches without the need to acquire Boolean search skills. From the Advanced Search page you can also restrict results to specific languages, domains, file formats, and more (see Additional commands and special syntaxes below). Moreover, you can mix advanced search operators for a single query, e.g. you can type in search terms in three advanced search fields, with “all the words” with the “exact phrase”, as well as with “at least one” of the words. First, a word about search term order and word proximity: As indicated earlier under Other factors to consider above, Google says that word order can affect multi-term queries, and that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you how to formulate a search query to take advantage of this fact. However, for searches containing both geographic terms (e.g. the name of an African country) and subject/topic terms, it doesn’t seem to make a significant difference, certainly not for the first 50 results. Example: sierra leone women rights legal status Rearranging this query as: women rights legal status sierra leone However, what is remarkable is that while the search for sierra leone women rights legal status generated 48,100 results in the morning of 19 May 2004 it had increased to 51,300 by early afternoon of the same day, although the initial 50 results were virtually identical. I can’t offer an explanation for this mystery! Adding special search operators (see below),
e.g. Using quotation marks can be one of the most effective ways to find very specific information. Enclosing your search term(s) within double quotation marks tells Google to treat your query as one unit, and for such searches it includes the stop words (see Important points to remember – and the dos and the don’ts above). Google calls this “exact phrase search”, and you can select this option in Google’s Advanced Searchmenu. It is especially useful when some of the words are relatively common – such as “Africa”, “African”, names of countries, persons, etc. – and you might be deluged with hundreds or thousands of results without much relevance to your enquiry. Examples: african studies companion 155,000 results african books collective 370,000 results “african books collective” 8,630 results The search without quotation marks retrieves similar results in the first 200 or so to those of the search enclosing the words in quotation marks. However, the latter search option almost exclusively limits it to results which contain references to press notices and articles about African Books Collective, and to book title and directory listings, etc., specifically relating to this Oxford-based distributor of African publishers’ titles. Using quotation marks is very useful in tracking down titles of specific books, articles or documents – whether it is the books or the articles themselves, comment and criticism about them, or book reviews. It can be equally successful when searching for names of individuals. For example, searching for the title of the winner of the African Studies Association’s 2003 Melville J. Herskovits Award, Joseph Inikori’s “africans in the industrial revolution in england: a study in international trade and economic development” (or even just entering it without the subtitle as “africans in the industrial revolution in england”) will lead you straight to the publisher’s online catalogue page for this title, as well as listings of the book in online bookstores, online reviews, and more. Here are some examples (not in Google’s results order) of the top search results: Title Details - Cambridge University Press Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in
... Africans and the Industrial
Revolution in England A Study in ... [UK Edition] - Africans
and the Industrial Revolution in England ... OPE-L message, Africans and the Industrial
Revolution in England ... Using quotation marks also works well for finding extracts from published works, or from articles and speeches; for example, this passage from Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism “unity is the first requisite for destroying neo-colonialism" finds Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of
imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah You can also guess a phrase. For example "the literacy rate in tanzania" will generate 14 results with that precise phrase, although an ordinary Google Web Search for just literacy rate Tanzania would provide better results, of which the first 50-100 results at least are all very relevant, the first being the UNDP Globalis site: Globalis – an interactive world map - Tanzania - Adult literacy ... The use of quotation marks often works well for tracking down the meaning and origin of (African) proverbs or quotations. For example, a search for “only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet" generates 369 results, albeit not necessarily offering conclusive answers, and most of the results lead to databases of proverbs or famous quotations, with little detail about the original source or contemporary usage, with conflicting attributions as to the proverb’s origin, and with some quite different interpretations of its meaning. However, scrolling down the search results will eventually get you to one or two more helpful sites that explain that this is an Ashanti (Ghana) proverb, and some sites also helpfully draw attention to books and other sources on Ashanti proverbs. It might be added, incidentally, that, comically, the Google “Sponsored links” for these search results showed small ads for water-monitoring equipment, ”find, compare & contact suppliers”, or advertising “Test your drinking water” water safe test kits! Another example: “when elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled” or in other versions: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers”; “When elephants jostle, what gets hurt is the grass”; “When elephants fight the grass gets hurt”; or, in Kiswahili, “Wapiganapo tembo nyasi huumia”. Some sites attribute this to the late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere (who used the proverb in a speech at the United Nations in New York at the height of the Cold War); others cite it as an “African”, Kiswahili or Kirundi proverb. The search results for this example, too, again take a bit of scrolling until one comes to one result from the African Proverbs, Sayings and Stories site http://www.afriprov.org/resources/explain2001.htm, which offers helpful information about the background of the proverb, its everyday use, and its different versions in other African languages. However, in both the above examples the search was of course simply for occurrences of the proverbs, rather than Web pages describing their origin and meaning. Thus truncating (in view of Google’s ten words maximum limit) the proverb to the first seven words and adding two search terms “when elephants fight it is the grass” origin meaning could conceivably lead to better results, although in this particular case it does not, and this search comes up with just 7 results, of which only one or two are directly relevant. Repeating the same search, but without the quotation marks and leaving out the stop words (see Important points to remember – and the dos and the don’ts) when elephants fight grass meaning origin actually retrieves better results, although it will again require some scrolling. Quotation marks are also very useful in tracking down Internet references to individuals, and can frequently assist in finding the addresses, and especially e-mail addresses, of African studies scholars at their residential or university addresses, or in finding the current addresses of African writers and artists. For example, a search for my name hans zell Detect plagiarism using quotation marks Using quotation marks can come in handy in detecting plagiarism and cheating, even though this will be restricted to online articles and other Internet documents. Enter a few words from a specific phrase or sentence from a paper or article, put quotation marks around them, and see whether other people have already used exactly the same phrase. Although Google limits search terms to not more than 10 words – and will highlight a maximum of 10 words in the search results – it seems to work well for a phrase search, or for part of a phrase, as this example shows: Had I started a sentence in this guide with this distinct phrase “clearly, books and libraries are not a developmental luxury” I would soon have been exposed as a plagiarist, as keying this phrase into Google promptly leads to an online paper by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Dynamics of Book and Library Development in Anglophone Africa” Paul Tiyambe Zeleza: The Dynamics of Book
and Library Development ... ... Clearly, books and libraries are not a developmental
luxury but are essential, especially
in our so-called information age where knowledge and information have ... If I had searched for another extract from this paper, “giving in to despair or to the populist dismissal of new technologies” Google would have come up with two results: the first is on The Book & The Computer page, where I have quoted from the article, with due acknowledgement of the source, in a paper of my own:
The Book & The Computer The second result finds the phrase in the original article:
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza: The Dynamics of Book
and Library Development ... If you do this type of search, when the Google results subsequently lead you to the site where the passage is quoted, you can use the “Edit-Find (on this page)” command in Internet Explorer (or its equivalent in other browsers) to find the phrase quickly and compare it with what you suspect might be plagiarism, or excessive quoting or paraphrasing without due credit. If you search Google for "how to detect plagiarism" it will offer you 150 or so Web sites and resources on this topic, some with useful tips and techniques how to recognize plagiarism and expose the copy-and-paste cheaters, although it entirely possible, of course, that in some cases suspected plagiarism may have been unintentional. Putting a plus sign in front of a search term (with no space between) instructs Google that this word must appear in the results, even though this might be a word it would otherwise exclude (including “stop words”, see Important points to remember – and the dos and the don’ts above). This is what Google calls the Inclusion Operator. You can precede two, three or more words with the “+” sign to instruct Google to find documents, etc., with all these words, rather than all the documents with any one of them. However, this is not always very satisfactory, and you will probably get better results by using the double quotation marks/exact phrase option mentioned above, or even just searching in ordinary search mode. Example: nigerian civil war +nigeria +civil +war Example: the african studies companion +the african studies companion Using the “-” signUsing the minus sign, which Google calls the Exclusion Operator, on the other hand, can be useful as a way of eliminating lots of hits that you don’t want, and especially for words that have multiple meanings and/or are used in a variety of different contexts. Putting a minus “-” sign immediately in front of each term that you don’t want (with no space between them) instructs Google to exclude these words from searches and find pages that do not contain the term. It can be used for multiple words in a search query. A typical example might be virus –computer Soyinka –Wole –W. Using the “~” signThe tilde character – which Google calls the Synonym Character, and which is interpreted to mean “approximately” – tells Google to search not only for the search term typed in but also for synonyms or associated terms. It works similarly to the OR operator (see Using the OR Operator below). Place the “~” sign at the beginning of a search term, with no space between them (but it works for only English-language terms.) It can be useful to find alternatives, or words associated with the search terms, or if you want a fairly broad search on a topic. Examples: ~data sierra leone health ~publishing kenya ~higher education Tanzania The synonym character operator can also work quite well in searching for concepts or abbreviations Google also supports the “OR” operator (used in capital letters) for synonyms or equivalent terms, which will retrieve pages that include either keyword of two search terms. This can be helpful if there might be different variants of the word or spelling differences – e.g. variant spellings of African languages, ethnic groups, or of place names in Africa – or for finding both the singular or plural form of a word. (Note: a substitute for the OR operator is the vertical bar “|”) Examples: botswana labor OR labour ethnic conflict côte d’ivoire OR ivory coast rome OR roma fulani OR peul swahili OR kiswahili Additional commands & special syntaxes In addition to the commands set out in the preceding section, Google offers many other advanced operators or special syntaxes for refining or narrowing your searches. Most of these can be formulated by using Google’s Advanced Search form. You can use multiple syntaxes in a single search query if you are trying to track down something very specific, but mixing syntaxes too liberally can result in unsatisfactory search results. Start off with using just one syntax command, and then build on this by adding syntaxes to keywords that are already part of your initial search terms/results. Here are some of the commands: The command “site:” permits you to narrow your search to either a particular Web site (or host) or a domain, which can be a country domain such as .uk for the UK, .ca for Canada, .se for Sweden, .ke for Kenya, .za for South Africa, .zw for Zimbabwe, etc.; or a top-level domain .com (commercial, originally mainly US but now also used elsewhere), .co (commercial in other countries), .edu (educational, for the US), .ac (academic, UK), .net (network), .org (usually non-profit making organizations and NGOs, etc.), .gov (government), or .info (information services). (See also inurl: below.) Enter the term(s) you're looking for, followed by the word "site" and a colon followed by the domain name (no space between). On the Google Advanced Search pages you can also use this to exclude results from sites or domains. This can be a useful filter to eliminate unwanted hits from all the .com, or .co sites if the words in your search query are likely to feature on commercial sites. Examples: african studies resources site:loc.gov african studies resources site:uk african studies resources site:ac.uk african
studies resources site:soas.ac.uk Nigeria
site:soas.ac.uk Other examples: culture arts yoruba site:edu ngugi wa thiongo site:ke While restrictions to country domains can be useful, and usually dramatically reduce the number of hits, beware of the fact that many countries in Europe and elsewhere outside the US now also use the .com domain rather than .fr, .uk, .za, etc., country domains. For example the Web site of the UK-based Hans Zell Publishing uses http://www.hanszell.co.uk whereas two of its print/online publications have .com domains, http://www.africanstudiescompanion.com and http://www.africanpublishingcompanion.com. And be equally aware of the fact that some people use the “obscure” country domains of places like Tonga in order to be able to use a company name that might not be available in its .com form, in other words, a country domain is not always and not necessarily any indicator of national content. If you want to conduct searches restricted to Web sites in particular countries, e.g. site:uk or site:za, Google will find pages with that country domain, but it will not pick up UK-based or South African-based Web sites with the .com domain. Moreover, results cannot come from an .edu and a .com domain simultaneously unless you add the OR command, which tells Google that you want results from either domain. Tip: if you want to limit your search to material from US government
sites you can also use Google’s “Uncle Sam” page at http://www.google.com/unclesam. Language restrictionsGoogle lets you use its language selector to limit results to pages written in a specific language, at this time 35 languages, but not in any African languages as yet. (Arabic is one of the languages that can be chosen and this might be useful for tracking down materials in Arabic from the countries of North Africa, and from the Sudan and Egypt). It can be useful if, for example, you are conducting research on a specific topic as it relates to francophone or lusophone Africa, and, together with using the site:[followed by domain] restriction, it enables you to search for documents or Web sites from both a certain country and in a specific language – for example, to conduct a search for Web sites (i) in French only, and (ii) appearing on French domains, with references to the Senegalese writer and cinematographer sembene ousmane or, with the accent, sembène ousmane For this it will be easiest to go to Google’s Advanced Search and select “Return pages written in French” from the languages menu, and, additionally, enter the site:fr domain for France in the appropriate Advanced Search operator field (or .fr, it doesn’t make a difference in the results). Or you could use site:sn if you wanted results only from Senegalese Web pages. Incidentally, this is a good example that shows that accents do matter. In many critical studies and references in English about the work of Sembene Ousmane no accents are used, and the search terms sembene ousmane retrieve over 11,000 results most of which are English language sites, but also some in French, German, Italian, Swedish, etc., all showing results of text without the accent. Adding the accent, and searching for sembène ousmane, reduces this to some 4,300 – most of them French language Web pages and resources – but, on the basis of a quick comparison at least, none of these appear in the search results without the accent, and thus clearly a separate search with and without accents, or using the OR operator, would need to be conducted. File formatIf you select the file format selector in Advanced Search you can restrict your search results to particular file formats, such as .pdf (Adobe Portable Document Format), ps (Adobe PostScript), or .ppt (Microsoft PowerPoint), although one minor limitation is the fact that Google won’t let you specify the size of the file. You could also restrict it to .gif or .jpeg (two of the most commonly used file formats for images and pictures), although when searching for images only it is usually better to conduct your search with Google Image Search. Regarding file formats, it might be added here that Google can convert all file types it understands into either HTML or text, and gives you the option to view files in different formats. If you have Adobe Acrobat Reader configured to display PDF files in your browser, and if you can’t be bothered to wait for a PDF file to load – for those without broadband, large PDF files can sometimes take several minutes – click on to “View as HTML” for quicker access, and if you simply want to see whether a document is relevant or not. This permits you to restrict search results to Web pages that have been updated within the past 3, 6, or 12 months; this might be useful for, say, recent news reports (see also Google News) or anything else for which currency is vital, though you will need to be mindful of the fact that any date-range searches will not relate to the date that the content was created or updated, but to the date when the GoogleBots last indexed the page. OccurrencesThese are additional commands, also called special syntaxes, which can be useful to hone your search or narrow your search results. They specify where your search terms must appear on the page. You can mix the syntaxes and/or combine them with search terms with or without quotation marks, or other Advanced Search operators. Note that in all of them there is no space after the colon. A number of them are of limited use, but here are some that could be helpful: intitle:[followed by search term/s] limits your search to Web pages or Internet documents whose title contains all the search terms. (If the search query consists of more than one word its is best to enclose the words in double quotation marks to avoid unwanted hits.) Examples: intitle:african studies intitle:african media intitle:african human rights intitle:”sierra leone” intitle:”robert mugabe” The above example would find almost 1,000 Web pages containing the words “Robert Mugabe” in their title, but these would not include activists’ or protest groups’ Web sites such as http://www.zvakwana.org because the words do not specifically appear in the page’s title. intext:[followed by search term/s] will search only actual body text, i.e. it will find pages that contain the specified term in part of the page, but it will ignore links, URLs and titles of Web pages. It operates in a similar way to intitle: above; if the search query consists of more than one word it is generally a good idea to enclose the words in double quotation marks to avoid unwanted results. A variation is allintext: which instructs Google that all search terms must appear in a page’s text. However, the uses of intext: are fairly limited, and if the search terms are enclosed in quotation marks there is usually no need to use the intext: syntax. inanchor:the anchor text is the text on a page that is linked to another Web page or a different place on the same page, and if this command is used it will restrict the results to pages containing the query terms you specify in the anchor or links to the page. The variation allinanchor: would indicate that all query terms must appear in links to the page. However, neither of them is likely to be much used in African studies research. inurl:[followed by the URL/Web address; there is no need to type in the http:// part] This command will limit the search to the URL of the particular Web page address. Sometimes this can be useful – for example, to find sites of upcoming major international conferences or Web sites relating to commissions or other specially constituted groups, or for very large Web sites such as the BBC or UN agencies. Examples: inurl:world summit on the information society http://www.world-information.org/wio/wsis inurl:truth and reconciliation commission http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/index.html link:[followed by the URL/Web address, there is no need to type in the http:// part] This search will tell you who links to a page or Web site, a handy feature – especially for Webmasters, NGOs, book and journal publishers, libraries, associations, etc., who want to know how many other sites link to their Web pages. This will provide some indication of a site’s popularity, and, if there are only a handful or no links at all, might explain the site’s poor Google page ranking (see Google’s page ranking and indexing system). However, it is not possible to limit the search by using additional syntax commands. Also beware that the results may well be incomplete. Examples: link:www.africanstudies.org finds 525 sites linking to the [US] African Studies Association (ASA). link:www.loc.gov/rr/amed/afs.alc finds 22 sites linking to the ASA’s Africana Librarians Council (ALC) link:www.indiana.edu/~libsalc/african/aln/index.html finds 21 pages linking to the online version of the ALC’s Africana Libraries Newsletter. link:www.bellagiopublishingnetwork.org finds 129 linking to the Bellagio Publishing Network. It seems to work equally well with top-level URLs and with “deep” URLs such as that of the Africana Libraries Newsletter in the example above. cache:[followed by the URL/Web address, there is no need to type in the http:// part] This will search for a cached copy of the page indexed by Google, even though the original Web address may have changed, is no longer available, has moved elsewhere, or if the server is down. Google also offers links to the latest cached version as part of the search results, which can be useful for Web sites that suffer from frequent down-times, or for those elusive African journals that have Web sites which don’t seem to work for most of the time or produce “Not found” error messages. Example: The Web site of the Nigerian-published Glendora Review was not accessible when last checked (20 May 2004), but a Google cache search cache:www.nigeria-arts.net/Literature/Periodicals/Glendora_Review/ still finds the Web pages originally indexed. Of course, retrieving cached versions of pages only works if Google in fact has a copy of them, and if it indexed the page in the first place. It is also possible that Google may have been asked to remove the cached page. Tip: while it will be helpful to memorize
the above advanced operators, commands and special syntaxes, bear in mind that
you can specify most of them on Google’s Advanced Search page. Google is a marvellous Web search tool and is as good as they get at present, but it is not the only one. For example, check out Teoma http://www.teoma.com/; All the Web http://www.alltheweb.com/; Ez2find http://ez2find.com/, a meta search engine which, through its advanced search function, also searches a small proportion of the invisible or “deep” Web; or Vivisimo http://vivisimo.com/, which uses clustering technology to organize matches in hierarchical folders and categorizes search results. There are other recently launched new search tools with interesting personalization features. One is A9 http://a9.com a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., which also offers a toolbar. Powered by Google, A9 lets you not only undertake Web searches, but also looks for book results from the Amazon.com Search Inside the Book™, which opens in a window alongside the Web results. A9 says “when you see an excerpt on any of the book results, click on the page number to see the actual page from that book”, but that is somewhat misleading. What the book results show you are not necessarily “excerpts”, but simply occurrences of the words in your search terms, appearing in a multitude of books. However, it is an interesting feature, albeit slightly hit and miss. It seems to work quite well for very specific search terms or unique (e.g. geographical) names, but is less successful for more commonly used terms, including those in the African studies field. In order to view the actual pages from the book results you will need to be registered at Amazon.com. Another one is the mysteriously-named Ujiko http://www.ujiko.com/, a Flash-based search tool that is being touted as a “next generation” search engine and a possible alternative to Google. It was launched in May 2004 by the Paris-based company Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com/, who already offer an unusual meta search engine with visual display interfaces – although I personally find it a little bit bewildering. Ujiko uses the new Yahoo! search technology and says it gives you access to over 4 billion pages, remembering your preferences, allowing you to customize results, and build a variety of personalized filters. Ujiko has a nice-looking, uncluttered interface and, unlike Google, stores your search history on your computer for privacy. A further new search tool that has caught my eye, and yet another potential competitor to Google, is IceRocket http://www.icerocket.com/, a meta search engine from a Dallas-based company that shows results “snapshots” – a thumbnail view of the page – displayed next to the search results. Additionally, it provides extra information and data about the search results, including loading times, Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) traffic rankings, and the number of sites that link to it (although that information doesn’t seem to be entirely reliable). It also offers various advanced search facilities and, unusually, let’s you do searches and receive the results by e-mail. Or take a look at the latest entrant
to the search engine market, Blinkx http://www.blinkx.com/overview.php
(Beta program, PC/Windows only at this time), which, through a freely downloadable Windows client, automatically finds Web pages, news articles
and local documents (including Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora mail files)
on your machine that are related to the content of your active window. You can
also use it to actively search Web pages, news articles and documents on your
machine that are related to a query you enter. However, Blinkx says it is not
aiming to compete with Google on keyword Web searches (it has indexed only
about 60 million Web pages thus far) and aims to find its own niche; and it is
not alone in developing desktop search tools that will make it easier to search
and index everything on a computer and make it easier to find. Both Google (an
add-on system provisionally codenamed “Puffin”) and Microsoft are expected to
launch their own text software search tools soon for locating information
stored on personal computers, and desktop search is now regarded to be the
logical next step in search engine development. Also worth looking at is Daypop http://www.daypop.com, a current events search engine, that currently crawls and indexes 59,000 news sites, Weblogs and RSS news feeds for current events and breaking news. The directory-style Eatonweb Portal http://portal.eatonweb.com/ is a good launch pad for searching Weblogs, and currently has over 19,000 Weblogs categorized by subjects, languages and countries, including 14 countries in Africa. Finally, many high quality information resources exist that are not within the reach, or are not indexed by Google and other popular search engines, and which are known as the “invisible Web”. As mentioned earlier, an excellent starting point to explore the Web’s hidden treasures is The Invisible Web at http://invisible-web.net.
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