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One of the biggest complaints we hear concerns the difficulty of finding targeted information. Where do you start? Searching the Internet requires part skill, part luck and a little bit of art. Fortunately, a number of free online resources help with the hunt. You've probably heard of Yahoo!, Google, AltaVista and SEARCH ENGINES (using upper case for emphasis here). There are literally dozens of these tools to help you locate what you're looking for. The trick is understanding how they work, so you can use the right tool for the job. Search engines break down into two categories -- DIRECTORIES and INDEXES. Directories, such as Yahoo!, are good at identifying general information. Like a card catalog in a library, they classify websites into similar categories, such as disability organizations, English universities and natural history museums. The results of your search will be a list of websites related to your search term. For instance, if you are looking for the Louvre museum website, use a directory. But what if you want specific information, such as biographical information about Leonardo da Vinci? Web indexes are the way to go, because they search all the contents of a website. Indexes use software programs called spiders and robots that scour the Internet, analyzing millions of web pages and newsgroup postings and indexing all of the words. Indexes like AltaVista at http://www.altavista.com and Google at http://www.google.com (my personal favourite) find individual pages of a website that match your search criteria, even if the site itself has nothing to do with what you are looking for. You can often find unexpected gems of information this way, but be prepared to wade through a lot of irrelevant information too. Search results may be ranked in order of relevancy -- the number of times your search term appears in a document -- or how closely the document appears to match a concept you've entered. This is a much more thorough way to locate what you want.
Here's the challenge: You are planning a trip to San Francisco and you've always wanted to ride a cable car. Do they operate in January? How can you find out? First we'll try Yahoo! at http://www.yahoo.com. One trick when searching is narrow your focus. Entering "San Francisco" in the search box results in over 2,000 sites related to the City by the Bay. Entering "cable cars" results in 74 sites, many of which have nothing to do with San Francisco. By combing the terms ("San Francisco cable cars"), The search returns 13 sites, along with a brief description of each one. Now you have to visit each site to see if there's any information about cable car schedules. Now let's try using Google at http://www.google.com, an index-based search engine. Once again, enter "San Francisco cable cars" in the search box. The Google search results in over 60,000 documents that match the search terms! Life is too short to comb through all these. The reason for this enormous list is that Google turns up every document that contains the words "San," "Francisco," "cable," and "cars." To search for documents that contain just this phrase, use quotation marks around the terms ("San Francisco cable cars"). Doing this results in about 2,000 documents. Fortunately, Google smartly ranks sites in order of relevancy, so the first few are more than likely to have information about schedules. Ask Jeeves at http://www.ask.com uses a technology called natural language query, a fancy way of saying that you can ask your question in plain English. By typing a question like "What is the San Francisco cable car schedule?" you get a list of related choices, such as "Where can I find a city guide for San Francisco?" and "Where can I find tourist information for San Francisco?" By clicking on the question, you will access a website that may have the right answer. Bear in mind that websites tend to change often. These changes are not always reflected in the search engine database, particularly for directories. Typically, websites are registered with search engines when they first go online. After that, changes are not reported generally. To find the most recent information, your best bets are search engines that use Web-indexing robots, software that constantly search the Internet, recording additions and changes.
Regardless of which search engine you use, it really pays to find out the particulars of how it works. Take the time to read the search tips on the respective sites. For instance, how does the engine handle searches that include more than one word? Most engines, but not all, return results that include any of the words. Because there is so much information online, you will usually want to limit the scope of your searches. How do you do this? This is a good point to digress a bit to talk about Boolean operators. The English mathematician, George Boole, developed an algebra of logic, which has become the basis for computer database searches. Boolean logic uses words called operators to determine whether a statement is true or false. The most common operators are AND, OR and NOT. These three little words can be enormously helpful when doing online searches. A few examples show why.
Searching... cable OR car Results in... The greatest amount of matches; documents with either word Searching... cable NOT car Results in... Documents about cable, but not about cable cars; a good way to limit the search. The exact syntax each engine uses varies, so familiarize yourself with each one's unique properties.
Rather than search each directory or index individually, you can submit your query simultaneously to multiple search engines by doing a metasearch.
Whether you want to search for information about cable cars, investments or any other subject, here are our five favorites. Remember, all search tools are not alike. Each uses a slightly different methodology, so your results will vary. You may not always find what you're looking for on the first try. AltaVista HotBot Ask Jeeves
Google Yahoo!
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