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Joseph Ogando

Try, Try Again

If At First You Don't Succeed, Keep Searching

If you're like most of your engineering peers, you have a love-hate relationship with search engines. On the one hand, generic services like Google and Yahoo hold out the promise of fast access to free technical information. On the other, though, these sites rarely serve up the information you really need — at least not without a fight.

Consider the often-frustrating search for materials information. If you type "nylon" into Google, you'll get more than 15 million results. That long list might contain what you need. But first, you would have to sift through literally millions of useless results. "Some of them would be about pantyhose," says Mike Kmetz, president of IDES Inc., a specialist in plastics information. He's not kidding: The top results for nylon in Google's image search are long on legs and short on stress-strain data.

Now you may be thinking no engineer would be so foolish as to enter so broad a search. But even if you narrow your search to a specific brand of nylon, you can get an overwhelming number of results. Enter "Zytel," in Google for example, and you'll still get back more than 250,000 results. That's great for DuPont, which makes the material, but not so great for you.

The results will continue to narrow if you keep searching and use more restrictive search terms. But this seemingly obvious search strategy is easier said than done.

According to Kmetz, one of the biggest mistakes engineers make when searching for technical information is that they give up too soon. "You have to be persistent," he advises. And persistence means an iterative approach to searches. When IDES engineers help customers fine-tune searches for hard-to-find information — something they do every week — they may refine their search 10 or more times.

Persistence may also mean using more than one search engine. Kmetz's company recently launched a vertical search engine that limits search results to technical information related to plastics (check it out at www.ides.com). But even he doesn't think engineers researching a new material should limit themselves to just one search engine — even his own. "We see our search engine as complementary to general search tools like Google," he says.

Both types of search engines have their own advantages. A good vertical search engine will filter out most of the non-technical content, saving a huge amount of time. But a general search engine like Google may turn up valuable information a vertical search engine might miss. For example, Kmetz notes that Google currently does a better job at returning relevant search results when users type a misspelled or inaccurate search term.

IDES' Plastics Web does make some error corrections of its own, and Kmetz says it will soon do even more. But even when it does, he believes the best bet for thorough engineers will be using multiple search tools to find important technical information.

Aside from being persistent, you also have to be specific to get the most relevant results. Yet it's not easy to be specific when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Advanced search techniques can help on this score, whether you're using Google or a vertical search engine. These advanced tips are too detailed to list here, but Design News has started an on-line forum on how engineers can get the most out of the Internet (http://rbi.ims.ca/4915-533). We've posted about a dozen of our favorite search engine tips to get things started.