Using Search Engines to Find Information on the Web

Search Engines

Search engines on the World Wide Web are remotely accessible programs that let you do keyword searches for information on the Internet. There are several types of search engines and searches may cover titles of documents, URL's, headers, or full text. Keep in mind that the results you get from one search engine may not match the results you get from another search engine. In fact, they are often different due to the way each search engine behaves. Therefore, it may actually be beneficial to use more than one search engine on a regular basis.

In this section, we will briefly look at Google and Yahoo. Web pages are often dynamic and can change at any time. As a result, you may find that if either site changes, your experience with JAWS may be different than what is described.

Google.com

When you first go to the Google Web site there is a blinking cursor in an edit box where you can type the word or phrase that you are interested in. The first thing you need to do is press the ENTER key to go into Forms Mode with JAWS. Once you are in Forms Mode, you can then type in keywords that will define your search. After you have typed in some text, press ENTER to activate the Search button.

Google only returns Web pages that contain all of the words in your query. If you find that you get too many "hits" or Web pages that match your search, you can enter more words in your search query to narrow the choices.

Using good keywords gives you better results. Be as specific as you can. For example, a search for the keyword "musicians" will yield far more results than a search for the keywords "Elvis Presley." You do not need to include "and" between terms, but the order in which you type your keywords will affect the search results. You can also search for a specific phrase by including words in quotation marks. Google searches are not case sensitive.

You can also use the following items within your keywords for Google searches:

• + (plus) sign. Causes Google to include common words or characters that Google normally might ignore, such as "where" and "how." If a common word is important in getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)
• - (minus) sign. Causes Google to exclude a word from your search. For example, "bass" can refer to fishing or music. You can exclude music-related hits by searching for "bass -music." (Be sure to include a space before the minus sign.)
• ~ (tilde) sign. Causes Google to include synonyms of a particular keyword in the search.
• OR searches are also supported. Use an uppercase OR between terms.

The I'm Feeling Lucky™ button takes you directly to the first Web page Google returned for your query. You will not see the other search results at all. For example, to find the home page for Stanford University, simply enter "Stanford" into the search box and choose the I'm Feeling Lucky™ button. Google takes you directly to www.stanford.edu, the official home page of Stanford University.

To find listings for a US residence, type any of the following combinations into the Google search box:

• first name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
• first name (or first initial), last name, state
• first name (or first initial), last name, area code
• first name (or first initial), last name, zip code
• phone number, including area code
• last name, city, state
• last name, zip code

Try a search for Freedom Scientific. Use this link to go to the Google Web site. On the results page, there are a couple of things you can do to get more information about the results of the search:

• The statistics of your search are typically placed between the search edit box and the search results. You can press DOWN ARROW a few times to find this line or you can use the JAWS find command CTRL+F to look for the words "Personalized Results" and then read that line. For example, when testing this the search found "Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about 37,700,000 for Freedom Scientific. (0.11 seconds)." This can be useful if you need to narrow the search.
• The items found as a result of your search are placed on the page as both links and headings. You can press the navigation quick key H to move quickly among the headings that match your search. Since they are also links, you can press ENTER to activate them and move to those Web pages of interest.
• Below each heading (and link) that match your search is a short synopsis of what that page is about. After pressing H to move to a heading (link) just press DOWN ARROW to read the text below it for more information.
• Remember, you can also press SHIFT+H to move backwards.

You can also read through the search results page using normal reading keys or use INSERT+F7 to open the list of links and see what related links were found. Use the Move to Link button in the links list (ALT+M) to move to a particular link and then down arrow through the associated text to find out if this might be what you are looking for.

Each hit is also followed by a "Cached" link. Google's cache is a snapshot of the page taken as it crawls the Web. Cached pages may have changed since they were first captured.

There is also a link below each hit called "Similar Pages" that may yield more results. In addition to the information displayed on the initial results page, there are often links to more pages of information that meet your search criteria. These pages are reached by activating the link for the number of the page. Usually you will find links for additional pages 2 through 10 near the bottom of each page.

Yahoo.com

Yahoo is another search engine that many people use. The main Yahoo page also has more information on it, such as sports and news headlines, entertainment links, and links to many other items. This tends to cause the page to appear more cluttered than the Google site, but may prove itself useful to you as well. As with Google, when you first go to the Yahoo Web site there is a blinking cursor in an edit box. Turn on Forms Mode in JAWS by pressing ENTER and type in your keywords. Then press ENTER to begin the search.

Yahoo behaves very much the same way as Google, and displays a list of ten hits per page of matching items. These are links to further resources, and each link here also has a text description taken from that source that matches your query.

After a Yahoo results page loads, press the letter H to move to the heading "Search Results" and press DOWN ARROW to the next line to find the results. You should hear something like the following: "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,860,000 for Freedom Scientific. Search took 0.11 seconds."

The results do not show up currently as headings, but are links with text between them that describe each link. Press INSERT+F7 to use the list of links to explore the links or you can also press TAB to move from one link to another. Each main link contains a short text synopsis below it and a few other links such as:

• Cached
• More from this site

Yahoo also has links to other results pages, just as Google does. These links show as numbers 2 through 10 and are located near the bottom of the page.