Refinement and relevance

Once you have begun to search for pages and gone to a few you will realise that there is a lot of information out there and not all of it is relevant. A good search service will allow you to refine your search or will provide a relevant value for the documents you have found so far.

• Refining your search means adding extra search terms of controls to your search.
• This may be as simple as adding more words or moving your current search into the Advanced Search.

Alternately you may stay with the current set of pages the search service has found and look for particular additional terms. Some search engines will rank a page higher if your terms appear in the keywords or the title as they are deemed more relevant.

• Relevance is a tool some search engines provide when returning a page found by your search. They will indicate how closely the found item matches your search.
• This is usually based on how many times your search terms appear on the page and how close they are to each other.

For example if the word ‘dog’ appeared five times in one page it would rank higher than one where it appeared only once. Also, if your search terms were ‘dog walk’ then a page that had ‘walk the dog’ would rank higher than ‘walk to the park with your dog’ as the keywords are further apart from each other. Again, the search engine will give you information on how they rank pages.

Because search engines look at information in this way, it is important to look at the information presented in the short summary that the results provide. You may find that a page with walk and dog further apart may have more relevancy then a page with them close together.

Here is an example of what you may find with Google search

We find out that we come up with information regarding walking your dog and information about how to walk the dog for a yo-yo. We will refine our search so that we have more relevant returns. This time we will look for ‘how to walk a dog’.

This is also why it is important to improve your search using additional search parameters or advanced search techniques. This should help you improve the types of pages ranked towards the top of your list and the relevancy of those pages.

Here is an example of the results from Google

As you can see more information is ranked higher on the page that pertains to walking a dog, instead of information about yo-yo’s, music, and skateboarding.

In a normal web document there are three main sections:

• title
• keywords
• body.

Three things to note are:

• what information is catalogued
• where it appears
• whether the search engine accepts sponsorship.

The final element is the sponsored link which is where a search service is paid to ensure particular links appear first whenever particular search terms are entered. Most search engines will state if a link is sponsored which may affect your opinion of the relevance of the link.