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Where To Find It On The Internet August 6, 2003
You know the information is on the Internet somewhere, but with BILLIONS of Web pages, Web sites and news groups out there, you may have problems finding exactly what you want. Here’s some help: If you’re looking for a company or organization, you can often find it by typing their name into your browser’s address box. For example, entering www.barnesandnoble.com or barnesandnoble.com (remember, no spaces) brings up the Barnes & Noble On-line Bookstore. Similarly, barnesandnoblebooks.com or bn.com or will bring up the same site. Typing in www.sears.com or sears.com brings up the Sears On-line Store, and so on. Many organizations use the .org extension, such as www.komen.org (the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Web). Educational institutions use the .edu extension, as in www.yale.edu. Government institutions use .gov and military, .mil. And to make matters more confusing, extensions such as .cc, .biz, .info, .web.com, .us or .tv are now allowed. If you’re looking for an area of interest, such as horse breeding, enter horsebreeders.com and it’ll bring up a horse breeders’ Web site, with many additional horse-related links. If entering specific names doesn’t work, or you find sites different from the one you want, using a search engines will almost always help you find what you want. Search engines are specialized Web sites where you type in a word, words or phrases related to what you want. The search engine then scans its index of millions of Web pages and gives you a list of Web sites, Web pages and, in some cases, newsgroups or FTP (file transfer protocol) sites that match or include the words or phrases you entered. The hit list (a hit is a Web page or site containing your keyword) will include a variable amount of information, such as a few words from the Web page, dates, size of the page, category of the hit, links to similar pages and such. Each search engine has its own set of rules for indexing and cataloguing Web pages, so you won’t necessarily find the same results from each. And you may need to use more than one search engine to zero in on what you want. A few of the many search engine Web sites are listed below. Most ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) home pages provide a search facility, but these generally use one of the common search engines. Some search engines let you limit your search to specific categories, such as MP3 music, auctions, sports, newsgroups or chat areas. Some provide parental controls to exclude searching on certain keywords or will only return safe sites in the hit list. Lycos provides a "Kids Zone" and Ask Jeeves has a " Ask Jeeves Kids" area for safe searching. Some search engines not only find a site but also review and rate the Web site. There are no standards for these ratings, so you need to read the fine print for each search engine. One search engine, Ask Jeeves, lets you ask questions in natural language rather than just using keywords. For example, "What is the deepest lake in the World?" And Altavista has a translation facility to allow searches in foreign languages. More extensive styles of searching are found in sites that have multi-search engine capabilities. These sites, known as meta search engines, simultaneously search several individual search engines and return the results in various formats--sometimes prioritized, sometimes categorized. A few of the Web sites that provide this service are DogPile, MetaCrawler and CNet. When using search engines, remember that the way you enter search terms can have a dramatic effect on the results. For example, when we used one search engine, entering the word "car" produced more than 7 million hits; entering "Ford cars" produced 700,000. Most search engines allow you to enter an exact phrase, i.e., all search terms must be present and in that order. For example, entering "Ford cars" as an exact phrase, returned 20,000 hits. Specifying "recalls" trims the list down to 400 hits. Each search engine site has help available to show you ways to modify and focus your query for best results. If one set of keywords or phrases doesn’t work, try similar ones that mean the same thing. Be patient and persistent, and you’ll get results. If you’re looking for people, many of the popular search engines offer options such as people search, people finders, white pages, e-mail finders or the like to help in your searching. Now if all you want to do is explore (surf) the Internet for interesting, fun or just plain weird stuff, that’s pretty easy. Start with www.website-awards.net for listings of Web sites that have won awards. These listings link you to quality Web sites that have good design and useful content. Most ISP home pages will provide you with links for news, weather, shopping and much more to satisfy your surfing needs. This kind of exploring is fascinating, entertaining, intriguing and addicting. Addresses for a few search engines we’ve used:
For listings of even more search sites, try www.101searchengines.com or www.search-engine-index.co.uk. Click Here to Return to the Main Column Archive Page Click Here to Return to the Home Page
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