Refine your
search!
(expanding searches towards the end of section) |
|
|
First
work out, as precisely as possible, what you want (and don’t
want) to find.
In the examples that follow I'm looking for something musicological,
preferably semiotic too, about Bernard Herrmann’s film music.
I think I may want to concentrate on the famous shower scene music
from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) but I want to see first
what there is about Herrmann in general. I’m going to commit
some typical student search errors and correct them step by
step. Please note that in what follows, the text
typed into the Google Search box is shown in
turquoise. |
Don’t
search just for general concepts.
Entering the single word musicology
in the Google search box generated over 2½ million links (2007-01-06)!
Entering musicology semiotics produced
‘only’ 92,000 links: less bad but still unusable. Of
course, the reference you want might be on my site somewhere: that'll
refinre your search by a factor of several million! Complete instructions
about how to use Search on this site can be found here
(<— click). |
Use
inverted commas ("...")
If
you search for film
music you'll
get links to all pages containing either film OR
music (392 million hits). If you enter
"film
music",
‘only’ pages containing the exact expression film
music will be listed (‘only’ 1½ million).
Both searches are pretty useless, so… |
Add
more words in the Search box
• Entering "film music" Hermann
produced 172,000 results: an improvement on 1½ million
but still unusable.
• Entering "film music" "Bernard
Hermann" gave 92,000 hits: still far too many.
• Entering "film music" "Bernard
Hermann" analysis resulted in 843 hits: still a lot
to go through!
• Entering "film music" "Bernard
Hermann" analysis musicology: 473 hits: better!
• Entering "film music" "Bernard
Hermann" analysis musicology semiotics: 81 hits: OK! |
Use
the plus sign (+)
+ before a word (e.g. +musicology)
or expression (e.g. +"film music")
means that the word or expression MUST BE INCLUDED in the web pages
Google presents in the results it produces (an AND condition).
Otherwise Google looks for ANY of the words you entered (an OR
condition) even though it starts its results listing with reference
to web pages containing the greatest number of your search words.
For example:
• +"film music" +"Bernard Herrmann"
+analysis +musicology +semiotics +Psycho: 18 hits
• +"film music" +"Bernard Herrmann"
+analysis +musicology +semiotics +Psycho +shower: 3 hits
(Guess where one of those references
is, apart from on this page! Yes, here). |
Use
uncommon (combinations of) words
It always helps if you can enter an uncommon word or phrase or name.
Adding the title of one of Herrmann’s films (Psycho in
this case) refines the search by a factor of 3, adding the word shower
(assuming interest in the famous shower scene music) by a factor of
9, and the name "Philip Tagg" as well by a factor
of 140.
|
#
pages listed | |
|Entered
in Google Search box |
|
140 |
"film music" "Bernard Herrmann" analysis semiotics |
|
48 |
"film
music" "Bernard Herrmann" analysis semiotics Psycho |
|
13 |
"film music" "Bernard Herrmann" analysis semiotics Psycho
shower |
|
1 |
"film
music" "Bernard Herrmann" analysis semiotics Psycho shower
"Philip Tagg" |
|
758,000 |
Psycho
shower music |
|
932 |
Psycho
shower music semiotics |
|
813 |
psycho
shower music semiotics analysis |
|
78 |
"Psycho
shower music" |
|
62 |
psycho
shower music semiotics analysis Herrmann |
|
20 |
psycho
shower music semiotic analysis "Bermard Herrmann" |
|
Use
the minus sign (-)
- before a word (e.g. -buy)
or expression ( -"special offer")
tells Google NOT to list web pages containing that word or expression.
For example:
|
#
pages listed |
|
|Entered
in Google Search box
|
|
303,000
|
Nirvana "Never Mind"
|
|
146,000
|
Nirvana
"Never Mind" -buy -sell -"for only"
|
OK, that
halves the number of hits listed but it’s still not much good
if you want to find serious stuff about the famous Nirvana album from
1991. Try Google Scholar (239 hits) and Google
Books (243 hits) instead. Here’s a better example (steps
7-10 in next section). See also Advanced Search.
|
|
Using
OR (|):
expand your search (and
then refine it!)
If
you don’t know about plus, minus, inverted commas in search
expressions, read this first!
I wanted
to find out as much as possible about the meaning of the minor-seven-flat-five
chord. (Why? Read this!).
Since this is a pretty esoteric search topic, I didn’t want
to miss any references. The table below charts my search progress.
Explanations follow it.
|
Links
listed
|
Entered
in Google Search box
|
Line
#
|
|
580
|
"minor seven flat five"
|
1
|
|
40,000
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished"
|
2
|
|
41,800
|
"minor seven flat five" | "half diminished" | "accord
diminué"
|
3
|
|
68,900
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished' | "m7b5"
|
4
|
|
207,000
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished' | "m7b5" |
"m7-5"
|
5
|
|
64,000
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished' | "m7b5" |
"m7-5" -guitar -tab
|
6
|
|
958
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished" | "m7b5" | "m7-5" -guitar
-tab +analysis
|
7
|
|
118
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished" | "m7b5" | "m7-5" -guitar
-tab +musicology
|
8
|
|
40
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished" | "m7b5" | "m7-5" -guitar
-tab +semiotics
|
9
|
|
20
|
"minor
seven flat five" | "half diminished" | "m7b5" | "m7-5" -guitar
-tab +analysis +musicology +semiotics
|
10
|
-
Entering just "minor seven flat five" only produced
154 hits. I need to find synonyms…
-
Entering "minor seven flat five" | "half diminished"
is the same as entering
"minor seven flat five" OR "half diminished"
— the bar symbol just means OR.
Now we know that half-diminished
is 69 times more common an expression than minor seven
flat five. Whoopee!
-
Adding |"accord diminué" produced another
1,800 results: worth knowing if you read French. This means that
there were, when I did the search, nearly 42,000 web pages containing
any of the three expressions.
- Adding
|"m7b5" (= min. 7 flat 5) to the search
box swelled the number to 68,900. Whoops!
- Adding
|"m7-5" (= m7b5) made matters even worse: 207,000
hits! Browsing those links it became clear that amany pages contained
the lyrics and chord charts of popular songs. Let's get rid of
some…
- Adding
-guitar -tab eliminated pages containing either of the
words guitar or tab: down to 160,000 hits.
- Adding
+analysis to the end of the search string radically reduced
the count to 958.
- Replacing
+analysis with +musicology brought the number down to 118.
- Replacing
+musicology with +semiotics brought the number down to
40.
- Entering
"minor seven flat five" | "half diminished" | "m7b5" | "m7-5"
-guitar -tab +analysis +musicology +semiotics brought the
number down to 20. Thank you!
That lengthy search expression literally means: list ANY web page
containing ANY one or more of the expressions mentioned but NOT
containing either of the words guitar or tab; at
the same time the pages listed MUST contain all three of the words
analysis.s,
musicology and semiotics.
|
Advanced search
|
|
To
the right of the Google search box you’ll see ‘Advanced
Search’ — very useful. It may be ‘advanced’
from a programming point of view but you don’t have to be an
I.T. geek to use it. Click Advanced search and you see something
like this.
Let’s
say (again) you want to find everything about the feeling or meaning
of the half-diminished chord but wanted to avoid all those links
to guitar tab pages of songs. Let’s say you also wanted there
to be a music example or two. First, I’d enter semiotic
OR semiotics into the first field (‘with all of
the words’), then example in field 2 (‘with
the exact phrase’), then the four ’words’
"minor seven flat five", "half diminished', "m7b5"
and "m7-5" into the third field (‘with
at least one of the words’). Finally, to avoid the
guitar tab pages, I’d put guitar tab into the last field
(‘without the words’). The I’d click ‘Google
search’. You may find ten or so pages displayed but only two
of them deal with the subject you’re actually investigating.
That’s perfectly normal and better than nothing at all.
|
(Language)
Preferences / Préférences (de
langue)
|
|
To
the right of the Google search box
you’ll see Preferences. Click it to set defaults for
language (or level of pornoography) you prefer. This text deals
only with Search languages.
On the Preferences page, Google rightly recommend searching
for web pages in All languages. Why? Well, if you want information
about, say, Rachid Taha (enter "Rachid Taha") and
if your search preference is for pages in English only, you've missed
the boat: only 23% of all Taha-related sites are in English while
52% are in French. Solution? Set Search language preference
to All and learn French!
Still,
even with Research language set to All, entering
"dance music" produces 15 times more hits then does
"musique de danse".
|
À
droite de la boîte de recherche chez Google,
vous verrez Préférences. Cliquez là-dessus
et cochez quelle[s] langue[s] vous choisissez (et quel niveau de
pornographie vous acceptez). Ici on ne parlera que des Langues
de recherche.
Sur
la page Préférences de Google, on vous conseille,
avec raison, de rechercher les pages Web dans Toutes les langues.
Pourquoi? Des exemples: seulement 2% des pages Web sur le reggae
sont en français. Même Debussy existe sur une
page en français 6 fois moins souvent que dans une autre
langue, principalement l’anglais.
Il
vaut la peine de noter que l’expression de Recherche "dance
music" produit 15 fois plus de résultats (toutes
les langues) que la phrase "musique de dance".
Solution? Choisissez Toutes les langues de recherche et apprenez
bien l’anglais!
|
Google
en français (entre
autres langues)
|
|
Google.ca
(Canada) and google.fr (France)
are both available in either French or English. Both language versions
list the same number of references for the same search. If you choose
French as Search language, pages in French are listed first
and vice versa if you choose English.
The
same principle applies to google.de
(deutsch — German titles first if you choose German)
, google.it (italiano),
google.pt (português),
etc. One exception: Google.es
(España) offers no English-first listing but does offer that
service for Catalan, Galician, Basque and Spanish.
For
essential information about Google search language selection, please
read the previous section.
|
Les
domaines google.ca (Canada)
et google.fr (France) sont disponibles
en anglais ou en français. Les deux versions linguistiques
génèrent exactement le même nombre de références
en réponse à la même recherche. Si vous sélectionnez
le français comme Langue de recherche, les pages en
français apparaîtront les premières. L’ordre
de présentation est renversé si vous sélectionnez
l’anglais.
Le
même principe s’applique aux domaine google.de
(deutsch — les titres en allemand au début de
la liste si on choisit cette langue plutôt que l’anglais),
google.it (italiano), google.pt
(português), etc. Une exception: Google.es
(España) n’offre aucune option anglophone. En revanche
on peut choisir le catalan, le galicien, le basque et l’espagnol.
Pour
des renseignements essentiels sur le choix de langue pour les recherches
Google, lisez s.v.p. la section précédente
sur cette page.
|
Google
scholar
|
|
Google
Scholar
is useful if you’re doing a university assignment. You’ll
avoid all the commercial junk and just get links to academic sites
without having to trawl through tons of irrelevant stuff or spend
time trying to refine your search. For example, entering
semiotic +musicology "film music" generates no more
than 150 links — very manageable! Google scholar is at http://scholar.google.com/.
Bookmark it!
|
Google
book
|
|
Google
Book
is useful if you need to find a book on a particular
subject. In January 2007 I only found 19 book references when I
entered semiotic +musicology "film music"
(Jan. 2007). That’s probably because Google doesn’t
scan all books, especially not those from very minor publishers
like the MMMSP! Still, there wer 649 books referring to both reggae
and dub (+reggae +dub), so there’s
no longer really much excuse for a skimpy bibliography in the case
of most university assignments. Google book is at http://books.google.com/.
Bookmark it!
|
Using
web pages in written work
Utilisation des pages Web dans votre travail
|
| The
internet is an almost inexhaustible source of information you can
easily cut and paste into your work. Whatever storage form that information
takes (text, image, music notation, recording) it is just as much
the result of someone else’s labour (author, edior, composer,
arranger, artist, etc.) as information stored in traditional forms
(books, periodicals, discs, etc.). Internet
plagiarism is regarded with the same severity as is conventional plagiarism.
Before quoting or summarising what you find on line, you must
read section 2.7 of this document,
especially subsection 2.7.1. |
L'internet
est une ressource presque inpuisable d'information que l'on peut
facilement couper et coller dans son travail. Quelle que soit la forme
de cette information (texte, image, notation musicale, enregistrement),
elle est autant le résultat du travail d'autrui (auteur, rédacteur,
compositeur, arrangeur, artiste, etc.) que l'information emmagasinée
sur des supports traditionnels (livre, journal, disque, etc.). Plagier
de l'internet est donc aussi mal vu que le plagiat conventionnel.
Avant de citer ou de résumer ce que vous trouvez en ligne,
il est essentiel que vous lisiez ce
texte, en particulier cette
partie. |
|
When
you quote or summarise from the web in your own work, you must make
a note of each page’s:
-
title,
-
URL (https://www…),
- the
date you accessed the page.
This
page, for example, accessed on 15 July 2007, would appear in your
bibliography as follows:
Tagg, Philip.
‘Web browsing and Google searches’. www.tagg.org/zmisc/WebSrch.htm
(2007-07-15).
This
information should be included in your bibliography. For more on
this topic, see this document,
§§ 11.4.2 and 12.2. |
Lorsque
vous citez ou que vous résumez dans votre travail le contenu
d’une page Web, il faut noter, pour chaque page :
- le
titre,
- l’URL
(https://www…),
- la
date de votre accès à la page.
Par
exemple, cette page, accédée le 15 juillet 2007, devrait
apparaître dans votre bibliographie comme ceci:
Tagg, Philip.
‘Web browsing and Google searches’. www.tagg.org/zmisc/WebSrch.htm
(2007-07-15).
Ces
informations doivent apparaître dans votre bibliographie.
Pour en savoir plus, consultez ce
document (en anglais), §§ 11.4.2 et 12.2. |
|
