Related Terms and Search Suggestions

Most of the search engines have query aids to help you see possibilities for your query. These may help you disambiguate terms where there are multiple meanings depending on the context. They will also show various aspects to the topic, and different phrasings. Seek these out and consider them as you are refining your search.

Sections: Web Search Engines | MetaSearch Engines

Web Search Engines

The main web search engines today are still not strong in helping searchers distinguish various meanings. Yahoo has the search assist that shows concepts, but as we see below, it failed to identify some obvious aspects of our test topic. Usually search engines show "related searches" from their huge logs of searches run by users.

Ask www.ask.com

Ask has search suggestions that show as you type that can help as you compose the query. It also shows what it considers to be related searches based on topic and search history.

On a search for jaguar you'll see related searches for cars and cats. Ask provides more aids with dictionary and encyclopedia entries.

Exalead www.exalead.com/search

Exalead shows a panel with ways to narrow the search: related terms, site type, languages, geographic location. Unfortunately it does poorly on jaguar - where the emphasis is on automobiles.

Google www.google.com

On some searches Google will show Searches related to at the BOTTOM of the page (hardly the best place but at least it's a start). See this example for jaguar.

Bing bing.com

Bing on some searches will show broad categories as well as Related Searches. For jaguar you'll see categories that are mainly about cars (dealers, parts, used), and related searches that are more cars than cats.

On health queries it can suggest refinements with categories such as treatment, symptoms. See diabetes.

Yahoo (search.yahoo.com)

Yahoo Search Assist shows search suggestions and related "concepts". The search suggestions are an extension of Try This. The concepts are terms extracted from the first 20 hits. For jaguar, Yahoo only knows cars at this time - cats and sports aren't being ranked in the top 10.

Duckduckgo Added Dec 2009

You have to turn to the new Duck Duck Go to really get some help with this question. It tells you immediately that jaguar has several meanings - which one do you want?

Meta-Search Engines

There are several metasearch engines that will analyze the text, extract main phrasing or topic and create clusters. Clusty is one. See Best MetaSearch Engines for more.

Clusty (www.clusty.com)

Clusty is a metasearch engine showcases Vivisimo's clustering technology. It analyzes results and groups them into their main topics. For jaguar you can easily pick out cars, cats, and the football team, but not the Mac OS.

Related Terms Exercise

Try all of these on a general topic such as organic food or global warming. See how each can help with suggestions for refining the query or in seeing the breadth of a topic.

Which do you like the most? Check your assessment against ours on the syntax answer page.

Where to Next?

Wrap it up with the Syntax Quiz