Keywords+and+Synonyms+(Block+C+Birch)

KEYWORDS AND SYNONYMS

What are they?

Keywords are words that are used to search information in Search Engines that refers to a specific topic.

Synonyms are different words with identical or very similar meanings.

How do we use them?

How we can use keywords to search more efficiently:

Keywords can enhance a search engine’s ability to locate relative sources. When only keywords related to the search topic are entered, the search engine only looks for sources that contain those keywords.

Eg. “When did World War II end?” on a search engine would retrieve sources with all words in that phrase ie. ‘when’, ‘did’, ‘World’, ‘War’, and ‘Two’ would be searched for. However, if we only entered “World War II end” the search engine would only find sources that contain those four words. This would allow us to research faster and with more relevant results.

How we can use synonyms to search more efficiently:

The use of synonyms can provide more results when used in a search engine as the technology can searches for not only the words we entered into the search field, but also the synonyms that match those words. Other times, the engine does not automatically search for synonyms but instead offers suggestions that could improve our search. For example, when using Google, in the left side column under ‘Something different’, there are a list of synonyms Google thinks could be useful to us. The use of keywords in EBSCO, JSTOR, United Streaming and WorldBook Online is the same as in Google - for keywords, unnecessary words hinder the most relevant results while specific keywords allow us to get results suited best to what we are searching for.

**EBSCO** Stop Words

Stop words are not added to the search dictionary, but they are counted as words for proximity searching purposes. EBSCO host will ignore stop words such as the, for, of and after.

For instance, if you entered “company of America” …

EBSCO host would return Company of America, Company of America, or Company for America. It would not find company of the America, because the search engine retains a word distance.

GOOGLE: // What NOT to do //
 * WHEN YOU'RE SEARCHING**

//What to do://

EBSCO: //What NOT to do// //What to do://

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