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With billions of web pages online, you could spend a lifetime surfing the Web, following links from one page to another. Amusing perhaps, but not very efficient if you are after some specific information. 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 search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and Ask Jeeves. 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 accounting firms, 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 MSN Search and Google 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 have entered. This is a much more thorough way to locate what you want.
Refining Your Search . . .
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 that 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.
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Searching... |
Results in... |
| bugs AND bunny |
Documents with both words |
| bugs OR bunny |
The greatest amount of matches; documents with either word |
| bugs NOT bunny |
Documents about bugs, but not about bugs bunny; a good way to
limit the search. |
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.
Some popular search sites:
 Google
AltaVista
Lycos
MSN
WebCrawler
DogPile
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