ARCHIVED 4.4.3. Search Engines
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New technologies bring extremely rapid changes in this area, but it seems useful to mention a few of the current search engines.
Google locates Web pages containing a particular term, ranks them, and in the list of hits, highlights the requested term in the context found on each of the pages retrieved. This approach helps you select the most pertinent information concerning the concept and its designations. If the search engine finds multiple results on the same site, it presents the best results first, and offers the option to continue the search in the site containing similar results. The Windows copy-and-paste function facilitates the selection of information that can be used in the writing or citing of textual supports.
Other online search engines like AltaVista and Vivísimo, and the desktop metasearch software Copernic Agent, are also useful when documenting terms. For example, with the professional version of Copernic Agent, it is possible to explore 120 subject categories using over 1,000 different search engines as well as extract key concepts from the results using the summarizer. The product also features automated search operations such as downloading, validating and refining, and offers a spell checker for queries and a search wizard to facilitate query formulation. With it you can organize searches into folders and track them, and even set the system to automatically relaunch searches at regular intervals and e-mail you new results.
The search engine Vivísimo can perform queries by key words combined with operators such as + and -, select documents and automatically sort them into folders by topic and subtopic. It is also possible to find specialized glossaries and vocabularies by querying, for example, "glossary + subject field". Search engines are also useful for searching for specific terms. Particularly in the case of spelling variants, comparing the number of hits can indicate which variant is most commonly used.
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