Search engines pervade students' lives -- and lexicons

Brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Google that obscure reference your French professor made in class yesterday. Make your bed.

Yes, "Googling" -- or searching the web through the search engine Google.com has become a part of the average college student's vocabulary. Whether students use Google or other sites, online searching is something that many Tufts students do often -- sometimes on a daily basis.

"I use Google or Yahoo probably 15 times a day," freshman Becky Hayes said. "Anytime there's something in a class that sparks my interest, or I want to clear up something I wasn't quite sure of, or if I want to go out to eat and I'm trying to think of a place to go, [I search the Internet]."

Hayes is not alone in her use of online search engines on a daily basis. "I use Google everyday, all the time, for finding songs, or specific information for classes -- basically everything," sophomore Andrea Andrade said.

Despite their heavy reliance on popular Internet search engines, many students are unaware that the 'magical' results generated by such sites are in fact the result of complex and varying information cataloguing systems.

"Some search engines are automated; some are run by people -- they don't all work the same way," Tisch Reference and Instruction Librarian for Sciences Regina Raboin said. "Search engines all have their own rules for what part of web documents they search and, therefore, retrieve. Some search web titles, first paragraph, full text, domain only, and some will rate and rank sites."

Even sites like Google and Yahoo -- which most students regard as largely interchangeable -- operate in dramatically different ways. According to Raboin, Google is a categorized as a "search only" search engine. Search only engines search the full text of web pages, as well as .pdf, .doc, .xls, and other Internet documents.

Junior Angie Caldera-Siu is a fervent Google devotee. "I Google everything," she said. "It's the fastest and the easiest, and the way it's set up is really good. I find the other ones, like Yahoo, a little slower."

Yahoo, unlike Google, is a "directory" search engine. "These search engines specialize in organizing and arranging web sites by subject or topic categories," Raboin said. "So when you search these engines, you are only searching what they have chosen to place in their directory."

In Raboin's experience, directory search engines can be more effective than search only ones: "Most often, those sites [in their directory] are more reliable and up-to-date," she said.

Some students, however, don't notice much of a difference. "If I can't find something on Yahoo, I do Google, but I usually get the same answers," Halperin said.

Another type of search engine is the "meta search," which "searches across the indexes of other major search engines," Raboin said.

Sophomore Daniela Mauro said she likes using meta search engines. "I use Dogpile [gotonet.com], because it searches all the other search engines, like Yahoo and Google," she said. "It brings up the first ten 'hits' from each one. So if a single search engine's not finding what you want, you can look at all [the engines'] hits."

According to Raboin, meta search engines "feature category clustering, allowing you to further refine your searches." Category clustering is a mechanism for refining search results; other types of mechanisms, though, help to refine the actual searching process, making the results even more efficient.

"Some search engines are more effective because they allow you to focus your search by limiting to year, domain, language, or document type," Raboin said. "This gives you more control over your searching."

Though the search engine Andrade frequents, Google, does not offer such search mechanisms, she still feels that she wields a large degree of control over her searches. "I feel like the way that I search for things is very specific, so the sites that are gonna come up are what I'm looking for," she said.

Even if a student's search is highly well-defined and specific, however, Raboin cautions that the results returned may not be reputable. "Students must be aware that anyone can put anything on the Web," Raboin said.

One of Hayes' recent Internet searching experiences illustrates this problem. "Recently, we were talking about segregation in my School and Society class, so I went and looked up 'de facto' and 'de jure' segregation because I didn't know the difference between them," Hayes said. "I found this website with a list of terms and 'definitions' ... it was basically a white supremacist website, but I couldn't tell right away."

In order to avoid such confusion over websites' legitimacy, sophomore Negar Razavi examines the URLs of her search results before clicking on them. "Usually, I'll look at the addresses of the websites themselves, and see which ones are.edu, .gov, or .org, and then try and pick out from those," she said.

Other students employ similar strategies to ensure that the sites they're visiting through search engines are legitimate. "If I'm looking for peer-reviewed articles, I'll use Lexis-Nexis, but if I'm looking for data -- numbers, purely numbers -- I'll use Google," sophomore Priya Sharma said. "Because of the type of information I'm looking for, it's usually easy to figure out what's credible and what's not. I'll usually go to the CDC website, the U.N. website, things like that."

Other students shy away from using popular search engines for scholarly purposes. "I rarely use Google for research, mostly for stuff like looking for a company's webpage or a library's webpage or something like that," sophomore Alison Isaacs said.

"If I'm doing research for papers, I use the library's search engines, like LexisNexis and Expanded Academic ASAP," sophomore Liz Halperin said. "On Google and Yahoo, you always get those random sites that have nothing to do with what you're looking for."

The Tisch Library website offers a number of web search tips and recommended search engines at www.library.tufts.edu