Searching the Internet

One of the main reasons for using the Internet is that somewhere out there is the answer to all your questions. All you have to do is find it. The key problem is that there is no formal directory of all Web pages. This is because almost anyone can develop and post a page on a Web server. There are four ways to discover interesting and useful Web pages. They are someone could tell you about a page, you could find a link from one page to another, by accident, and you could use a search engine.

Someone could tell you about a page: This may be one of the most common ways of finding something on the Internet. It seems as though every magazine, newspaper, movie, product, or group is urging you to visit their Web site. Just listen to their commercials and read their ads -- you'll find their Web address somewhere.

Another place to look is magazine articles and news shows. Quite often a Web site is given as a place you can go for more information. This is where I have gotten many of mine. So look around and see what you can find.

You could find a link from one page to another: This is another common way. Sometimes there are links to related Web sites. These may or may not be helpful. It depends upon how diligently the site is maintained. Many times the links are no longer valid. One thing about the Web is that it is constantly changing. Just because the site is there today does not mean it will be there tomorrow. Many times sites with links will contain a note asking you to let them know of links that are no longer valid. But sometimes you get lucky and find some really neat sites.

By accident: You may find more Web sites this way than you think. Since many companies use TheCompanyName.com for their Web address, you can try making up an URL and see if it takes you where you want. However, if you misspell the URL of one site, or put the wrong ending on it, you may get an error message. Or you may end up somewhere else. Some companies take advantage of this. Many people go to www.whitehouse.com thinking they will get the White House in Washington, D.C. (they are used to seeing the .com ending on all those commercials). But governmental agencies end in .gov, not .com. What they end up with is a picture of the Intern of the Month, and possibly a surprised look on their face. Other sites use an abbreviated or shortened name of a well-known company, or the site may belong to a company located in another country.

Search engines: The fourth way to search for information on the Internet is to use a search engine. There are many different search engines available. Search engines can be categorized in one of two ways -- directories and indexes. Directories are good at identifying general information. They group Web sites together under similar categories. They might work if you are looking for a museum. Web indexes search the contents of a Web site and index all the words. They use programs called spider that search the Internet, indexing all the words. They rank sites according to the number of times the word you are looking for appears on the page. Frequent appearance may or may not affect its relevancy to your need.

There are many search engines available, and each one varies slightly in its search criteria syntax and in its search technique. So if you don't find what you are looking for with one search engine, try another one. They often include tips for searching or hints on how to use that search engine, so check those out as well. Some of the more popular search engines are:

AltaVista -- the largest index of Web sites. It creates complete indexes of every work on every web page or Usenet newsgroup it encounters. Each page returned is given a date and time from the search engine's more recent update.

Excite -- tries to figure out what you're trying to accomplish, rather than what you're searching for. The two aren't always the same. It analyzes your query and tries to provide targeted results, rather than simply doing a keyword match. This is especially true if you're searching for information about places, events, companies, or groups like bands or sports teams. It also gives you the option to view more documents similar to those described in a particular result.

Go.com -- is a web-indexing robot. You can search a variety of databases, including the Web, Usenet, and E-mail addresses. Go.com offers two kinds of results: "Matching topics," which are links to its reviewed directory of Web sites, and "Web search results," a list of relevant pages, displayed with your keywords highlighted in yellow. It also lets you search within results.

Google -- it is the biggest and the fastest of the crawlers. It ranks results both on how many links point to a page (importance) and search phrase matching.

HotBot -- uses a very large index of Web sites. However, unless you go past the first ten results, you're only seeing the most popular results for your query, not necessarily the ones that provide the best match. The top ten results at HotBot are served by the Direct Hit "popularity engine." This gives higher scores to pages that other people have actually clicked through to visit. In theory, they are more likely to be more relevant to what you are looking for. But you never know.

Lycos -- is one of the oldest search engines on the Web, and is a web-indexing robot. It is now primarily a human-compiled directory, courtesy of the Open Directory project. This means the results you get have been put into categories by editors who have looked at Web pages and categorized them accordingly. Humans are still are better at making these kinds of decisions than computers, so your results will often be better than with the other search engines. It can also locate pictures and sounds on the Web.

WebCrawler -- WebCrawler supports "natural language searching" so that users can type their searches in plain English without worrying about mastering complex search syntax.

Yahoo -- is a directory entirely compiled by human editors, who place every entry into a relevant category. This makes it easy to browse for information by drilling down through sub-categories. Yahoo's search service tries to find categories within its directory that potentially match your query. These are presented in a hierarchical list without annotations, so you have to click through to see if the results within the category are meaningful or not. Some of its links are out of date, so you might not get good results if you are looking for something specific or recent.

Metacrawlers and metasearch engines: Unlike search engines, metacrawlers don't crawl the web themselves to build listings. Instead, they allow searches to be sent to several search engines all at once. The results are then blended together onto one page. Some well-known metacrawlers are:

Ask Jeeves -- allows you to ask a question (in question form). If it cannot answer a question, it pulls results from various search engines in its metacrawler mode.

Dogpile -- sends a search to a customizable list of search engines, directories, and specialty search sites.

Go2Net/Metacrawler -- Metacrawler is one of the oldest meta search services. It was purchased by go2net.

Mamma -- sends search requests to seven major search engines.

Search engines for kids: Some search engines are designed more for kids. They either bring back responses more in line with kids, or filter out sites that some adults might find inappropriate for kids. These usually include sites that deal with explicit sexual matters, porn sites, violence, hate speech, gambling and drug use. Some examples are:

Ask Jeeves For Kids -- can ask questions in natural language format. If it cannot answer a question, it pulls results from various search engines in its metacrawler mode.

Yahooligans -- designed for ages 7 to 12. Sites are hand-picked to be appropriate for kids. Additionally, adult-banner advertising will not appear within the service.

For more information on search engines, or links to other search engines, try the following sites:

http://websearch.about.com

http://searchenginewatch.com

[ Back to Discovering the Net ]