WebKWiC Help with
Searching Google™

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Purpose

WebKWiC (Web Key Word in Context) harnesses the power of Google™'s popular search engine to simplify the task of online research.  When you submit a search, WebKWiC automatically retrieves a number of documents matching your query terms from Google™'s cache. Google™ highlights the key words from your search with color codes to help you find them in context. WebKWiC adds navigation buttons to each document to help you find your search terms in the documents and to facilitate working with multiple windows.  

Entering Search Terms

WebKWiC's search window is adapted from Google™'s Advanced Search form.  Follow this link for Google™'s search help.  Key points for specifying search criteria are...

• Enter any combination of words or phrases in any or all of the fields to specify that documents must contain all, any or none of the words you enter, or else the exact phrase you specify.  
  • In any field, phrases may be enclosed in quotes " ", and alternates may be separated by OR (upper-case distinguishes it from the literal word or.)
  • Logically, these fields are joined by an implicit AND (in the case of none, AND NOT).
  • Words and phrases in the any and none fields are implicitly linked by OR, and those in all fields by AND.
• Narrow the search by specifying domains (e.g. international .com, .org, or national .uk, .de, .fr etc.) or even individual websites (e.g. miniappolis.com) to include or exclude.
• Ensure more accurate matching by entering UPPER-CASE or special characters like á ä à ã æ å etc. where appropriate; plain lower-case characters match any variant forms of the letter. Click the link "Insert special char (á ä à ã æ å etc.) at end" to bring up a window for special character input. Note that each entry field has a separate input window identified by the text in its title bar. For information on alternatives follow this link.

  Practice character input    Insert special char (á ä à ã æ å etc.) at end
  

• Google™ does not support wildcards ("stemming"). All variants of base words to be matched must be spelled out completely.
• Stopwords - very high-frequency, low-content words like articles, pronouns, prepositions etc. - are not normally matched. Put a + in front of such words to force a match.

Searching

Enter your search and click the button. Be patient while WebKWiC submits your query to Google™. WebKWiC will retrieve your documents and display them in separate windows, which have these navigation buttons (click for an explanation of their purpose):

 < Prev Doc      Next Doc >      Maximize      < Prev Cite      Next Cite >    

 Close         Print       ^ Search Window 

You will be notified if no matches are found. Otherwise the total number of matching documents appears above the search criteria fields. When you have examined all the documents, click to fetch more. closes all the document windows at once; they also are closed automatically when you exit WebKWiC.

Once you have started a search, is disabled to prevent it from accidentally reloading documents you have already seen.  To enable the"Start Search" button again, just change the search terms (tip: you may have to click outside the field you have edited to reenable this button).

Options

Several search and report options are available.

• Select the language of documents to retrieve with this dropdown box.
  Show documents in...   Any Language Chinese - Mainland Chinese - Taiwan Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Spanish Swedish
• Filter out sites with possible objectionable content by turning on
  SafeSurf   Off   On
• Specify the number of documents to fetch at a time with
  Number of documents to fetch at a time
      3    6    12    18  
  Powerful systems with fast Internet connections may support retrieving large numbers at once. Otherwise a number at the low end of the range is best, especially since document retrieval tends to interfere with work taking place in other windows.  

Requirements

Currently WebKWiC can only be used under Windows with Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater. Cross-platform and cross-browser versions may be implemented when Netscape and Macintosh-compatible browsers provide appropriate functionality. Familiarity with using search engines is presumed. 

Updating WebKWiC

WebKWiC will be updated both to add new features and to respond to changes in Google's search reports.  To download the latest version, click "Update WebKWiC" in the WebKWiC Program Group of the Start Menu.

Potential Problems

1. Netscape is default browser. Double-clicking on the WebKWiC.html file icon (which in this case appears as a Netscape icon) launches Netscape, and WebKWiC cannot carry out your search. To run it under Internet Explorer, double-click on the WebKWiC.lnk icon instead (which appears as an Internet Explorer Icon). You may have to edit the properties of this shortcut to point to the Internet Explorer folder on your system, and to the folder where WebKWiC is installed.
2. Debugging / JavaScript error messages enabled. Google™ often indexes pages which were intended to be shown in frames and reference JavaScripts on parent frames. This may lead to display of cryptic error messages.  To disable these irrelevant but irksome messages in Internet Explorer, click on the Tools menu, select "internet Options", check "Disable script debugging" and uncheck "Display a notification about every script error".

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WebKWiC is ©2001 by miniAPPolis.com, which is not affiliated with Google™. All rights reserved, including, but not limited to, those of distribution and script modification. Help file version 20 March 2001.