Search engines and meta-search tools are the principal vehicles for finding documents on the web. Because there are many misconceptions about how these tools actually operate, it’s important for recruiters to understand their real structure, capabilities and limitations.
Search engines find web pages by matching keywords or phrases found in the documents. But it’s important to note that users are not searching through a live interface to the web. Search engines build a proprietary database of text snippets retrieved from web pages by automated software programs called spiders. Spiders are configured to follow links and gather information from specific areas on a web page. The search engine then builds a database (or index) of the results. When a user searches a search engine, they are actually searching text snippets saved to the index, not the web itself.
With billions of the pages already on the web and some estimates claiming that over 7 million pages of the content are added every day, it is extremely unlikely that any single search engines will ever index the entire web. It is also important to know that no two search engines index contains millions of unique pages. Therefore, to access the universe of documents, across even 50% of the web, recruiters need to use multiple search engines.
Meta-Search engines
Meta-Search engines are tools that search multiple search engines all at once. This sounds like great solutions for recruiters, but there are some complicating issues.
First, because each search engine uses slightly differently syntax, meta-search tools have a hard time keeping up. Second, because only a small subset of search engines support advances search featured like field search commands, most meta-tools do not map search strings with those commands. That means some meta-tools are not particularly useful for all the types of advanced search we’ll learn in our search lab, although they are getting better at supporting more advanced searches every day. Additionally, we would strongly recommend that you experiment with these meta-search tools occasionally.
A few top meta-search tools are:
The SearchLab Portal contains additional online and offline meta-search tools. Now that we understand these terms, it’s time to understand how to work with search engines. Next, we’ll learn to use Boolean logic and field search commands to construct complex search strings.
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