Revised: March 13, 2000

More Hints on Searching

1. Although Ask Jeeves is designed to handle questions in natural language format, many other search engines will not handle these questions well.  The basic problem is that you are likely to type too many words.  Search engines interpret multiple words typed in the search box in 3 possible ways, depending on the search engine:

• at least one of the words must appear in the document (word1 OR word2 OR ...) [the most hits]

• all of the words must appear in the document (word1 AND word2 AND ...) [fewer hits]

• the exact phrase typed in the search box must appear in the document [the most restrictive]

Although search engines ignore common words (e.g. articles and prepositions, particularly when not looking for a phrases, a natural language question is likely to get too many hits or too few, simply because you have typed too many words.

2. Traditional search engines that are used to search the internet look for words in web pages.  Also on the internet you can  search particular databases.  Examples would be the following:

• addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses -- "white pages", "yellow pages", "reverse directories"

• airline flights and fares at travel sites such as Expedia, Travelocity, etc.

• books or other items at an on-line retailer, such as Amazon.com

• cars

• comparative pricing for books or other items at several online retailers (e.g. pricescan.com or mysimon.com) - these are termed shopping "bots"

• housing - apartments to rent or houses to buy

• jobs - sites such as monster.com

• maps

• stock prices

• stock symbol for a company, or the reverse

What one types in these various sites depends a lot on the site and the comments about general internet search engines may not apply.  The advantage of these sites is that one can search in ways that aren't possible in a search engine that simply is looking at web pages because one can query the database and only return results if the values of particular variables are the desired ones.