Searching Online
If you are looking for books or for journal or magazine articles on a topic, you will probably want to search in a library database (the library catalog, or perhaps a journal or magazine index). If you are looking for websites on a topic, you will want to use a web search engine or directory to search the Web (which may itself be considered a huge, chaotic database!)
|
Library databases |
The Web |
|
|
Contents |
Library databases contain carefully selected records (representing books, articles, etc.). The records are made up of fields (e.g. author, title and subject fields). Some databases have just citations; some include abstracts (summaries); some include the full text of articles or books. |
The Web contains millions of hyperlinked files of many sorts (text, images, video, sounds) on an infinite number of topics. Anyone can put up a web page. Some people include "meta-tags" in their web pages that provide useful keywords and descriptions to web search engines…but most do not. |
|
Keyword searches |
The easiest, broadest way to search in any database: simply put in a keyword to pull up records with that word in them. |
The easiest, broadest way to search on the Web. Problem: a search on a single word may retrieve tens of thousands of files! |
|
Boolean logic |
Library databases let you use AND ~ to narrow a search OR ~ to broaden a search NOT ~ to narrow a search |
Many Web search engines allow you to use + or - to include or exclude search words; many let you search for phrases by enclosing words in "" |
|
Advanced searches |
Library databases allow you to search particular fields (e.g. author, title, subject), and to limit your search by date, language, format, etc. |
Some search engines (e.g. AltaVista, HotBot, Infoseek) let you search particular fields in web pages (such as URL, title, or image) or to search by format or language. |
|
Related records |
Library databases often let you link to records by the same author, or about the same subject |
Some search engines allow you to retrieve "more like these" (exactly what that means is often not clear). |
|
Truncation |
All library databases allow truncation, usually using * (exception: our catalog uses $) |
Some search engines (e.g. AltaVista, HotBot, NorthernLight) allow use of * ; a few others automatically truncate |
|
Search terms |
Records in library databases have been assigned subject headings from a carefully controlled vocabulary. This groups similar records together. |
Search engines do not use controlled vocabulary. Some web directories (such as BUBL, Infomine or NetFirst) do. Web directories also group websites by category for browsing. |