Section 1. Locating Human Rights Information on the Internet

How do I locate human rights resources on the Internet?

The Internet is an incredible resource for human rights information. There are literally thousands of Internet sites (or locations) offering urgent actions and alerts, reports, news, laws and decisions, etc. Therefore, you should become familiar with how to locate the most current and relevant human rights materials.

Use Internet Search Engines

One of the best ways to locate human rights information on the Internet is to use a search engine. A search engine is a tool that quickly reads through indexes of collected materials on the Internet to locate specified key words or phrases and returns a list of hits (matches) to those words.

The following are the URLS (Uniform Resource Locators, or Internet addresses) of some of the more popular WWW search engines. Any of these search engines can be accessed by entering its Internet address (http://...) into your Web browser's address field (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Entering the Internet address for the Yahoo! search engine

» Some Internet Search Engines

Yahoo!             http://www.yahoo.com/
Lycos                http://www.lycos.com/
AltaVista           http://www.altavista.digital.com/
OpenText          http://www.opentext.com:8080/omw.html
Infoseek Guide   http://www2.infoseek.com/
Magellan           http://www.mckinley.com/

There are also some "multi-index" search engines which search the indices of multiple search engines:

MetaCrawler    http://www.metacrawler.com
MetaCrawler searches AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler, and Yahoo! simultaneously

All in One http://www.searchallinone.com
All in One allows access to virtually all search engines, but unlike MetaCrawler, you must search each one separately.

Every search engine presents the user with a field (or blank) in which to enter a search strategy (words, phrases, and any additional information on how the words or phrases are related to one another) and a search button, which will execute the search request (Figure 2). For example, if you are interested in finding sites containing information on human rights abuses in Burma, you would start by entering the keywords human rights burma in the blank and pressing the search button.

Figure 2: Search engine field with keywords entered for a search

 

» Some General Tips on Using Search Engines

No two search engines are the same. They vary in accessibility at any given time (due to the volume of Internet traffic or usage), search speed, comprehensiveness of the coverage, the amount of information they provide, and the manner in which they return and present the search results.

» Required and Prohibited Terms

A major goal in searching the Web is to limit the "noise to signal" ratio or wanted (signal) vs. unwanted (noise) results. One of the simplest ways to limit the noise to signal ratio is to use required terms and prohibited terms in your search strategy. Required terms are preceded by a "+" symbol and prohibited terms by a "-" symbol. By using required term markers, you are stating that the search results must contain the specified term; a prohibited term marker indicates that the search results cannot contain the specified term. For example, the search strategy +Mexico +Chiapas +human +rights -travel would return results containing the words Mexico, Chiapas, human and rights, and not containing the word travel, thus ideally avoiding sites concerning tourism in Chiapas.

» Results Ranking

All search engines will make an attempt to break a search strategy into its smallest entities, which are basically single words. Three words entered side by side, e.g. human rights burma, without any other notations will be treated with equal weight by all search engines. The result of this search would include all pages that contain any of the three words and any combination thereof.

All the search engines, with the exception of Yahoo!, apply various types of ranking or weighting to the search results. With results ranking, the more often your search terms appear in any given document, first in combination (human and rights and burma), then separately (human and/or rights and/or burma), the higher they will be ranked and the nearer to the top they will appear in your results list (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Metacrawler results for the terms human rights burma showing results ranking

Figure 3 shows the results of a search for human rights burma. The first hit on the list, All Burma Students' Democratic Front, received a ranking of 1000, the highest score in Metacrawler as it contains the occurrences of all of our search terms. The second hit received a score of 510, as it contained fewer occurrences of the terms. This does not mean, though, that the second hit, Asean Urged To Address Abuses In Burma, Cambodia, is any less related to human rights issues in Burma than the first hit in the list. It just uses the terms less frequently. New search engines are currently being developed that will be more adept at concept searching. In the meantime, always examine closely at least the first ten to twenty results on your list.

» Phrases

A phrase consists of two or more words, in which all the words are of equal importance and their order of appearance has to be matched exactly. For a search engine to recognize a phrase, it has to be marked as such, usually with quotation marks at the beginning and end of the phrase, e.g. "human rights." Some search engines allow other ways of grouping words together. For example, in AltaVista you may insert punctuation between each word in the phrase: human;rights Burma.

» Case Sensitivity

Some search engines, such as AltaVista and InfoSeek, are case sensitive, responding to upper and lower case letters entered in search terms. This does not mean, though, that case will be matched letter by letter in search results. For example, AltaVista will return all occurrences of a word entered in lower case, regardless of capitalization, where any capitalization in a search term will force AltaVista to become case sensitive. Excite is not case sensitive, unless a word with capitalization is entered in quotations. InfoSeek treats capitalized words as proper nouns.

» Wild Cards

Wild cards consist of asterisks ("*") and question marks ("?"). The use of an asterisk at the end of a word or partial word tells the search engine that it only needs to match what precedes the asterisk. For example, burm* would retrieve both Burma and Burmese. A question mark represents a single character in a word and tells the search engine that any character may appear in the location of the question mark. This can be useful for English spelling variations between countries. For example, organi?ation would retrieve both organization and organisation.

» Some General Rules for Using Search Engines

Despite these differences among Internet search engines, there are some general rules that can be applied to any search, regardless of the engine being used. To limit noise, try to enter as many terms as you can to pinpoint what you are looking for. Never use articles (the, an, etc.) or conjunctions (and, or, etc.) unless they are part of a phrase or you are conducting a Boolean search, where the use of such words as and, or, not and within are used to specify relationships between your search terms, for example mexico and "human rights" not travel. Use wildcards whenever possible to retrieve all forms of a term: violat* for violation, violations, or violate. And finally, enter as many variations in spelling as you can think of: labor, labour or organization, organisation [3].