Note: This article was originally published in The Greeley Tribune, Sunday Business Section, June 13, 2004

Web Wise

Search Engines and Star Trek

By Lori Gama-White

When Captain Kirk whipped out his communicator in Star Trek, usually he was seeking information that Lieutenant Uhura had at her fingertips via a computer. Captain Kirk would ask Lieutenant Uhura “what atmosphere data do you have about Planet Nebula?” She would reply almost instantly with an answer.

That’s how a search engine works.

You type in a word or phrase, click a button and usually find the information you’re looking for. Sometimes you find more information than you need. Sometimes you don’t find any.

How do you ensure that your search engine is returning relevant results when you go looking for information? Think like Lieutenant Uhura. I’m guessing that she typed her query in quotations like this: “Nebula atmosphere” rather than this: Nebula atmosphere (without quotes).

By placing quotation marks around your phrase, you’re asking the search engine to return only results that have that exact phrase. Like this:

The Nebula atmosphere is highly toxic to human beings.

Otherwise, if you type it without quotes, you’ll get listings that contain “nebula” and “atmosphere” as separate words, possibly in separate sentences. Example:

“The Nebula galaxy is fictiously located in the outer reaches of our universe. The planets that are located there each have an atmosphere that’s not conducive for growing hydro phonic plants.”

Without quotation marks around your phrase, you’ll probably get hundreds of listings, many of which won’t be useful to you. The top listings will contain a higher number of repeats of your phrase. Search engines figure that if your keyword or phrase is repeated a lot in a Web page, it must be relevant to your search and so the site’s listing is returned high up (first or second page).

Captain Kirk relied on his communicator much like we rely on our mobile phones. Mobile phones accessing the Web (the “wireless Web”) are on their way to catching up with Star Trek’s vision of communication. Location-based services will make up “over 40 percent of worldwide operators' mobile data services revenues in 2007,” according to a study done by the Arc Group (arcgroup.com). Soon, you’ll use your mobile phone to access geographic-specific information for things to do and places to go. Instead of asking about the atmosphere of Planet Nebula, you might ask something like “where’s the nearest sushi bar?” or “what’s the current weather like in Estes Park?” The growing popularity of luxury vehicles with roadside assistance is an indication that people want this type of service—your own personal computer literally at your fingertips.