A Searching You Will Go
By Kim KomandoThe journal Science recently reported that there are about 320 million publicly accessible Web pages and even the best search engines index just a fraction of them, usually no more than 40%. You've probably bookmarked an all-purpose search engine like Yahoo, AltaVista or Excite to make your Web searching easier. Depending on the job at hand, however, these all-purpose search sites might not be the sharpest tools in the shed.
If you'd rather widen your search than narrow it, there are several sites to accommodate your needs. For starters, point your Web browser to HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com) where you can uncover pages not only using keywords, or search phrases. You can also specify results by date, domain, links to an URL, and other items, up to whether the page contains audio, video and images.
Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) puts another twist on searching. Instead of simply using one search engine, Dogpile lets you search the most popular ones simultaneously. Among them are Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, PlanetSearch, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, and AltaVista.
Much like Dogpile, Goto.com (http://www.goto.com) lets you move out of the search only one site box. The beautiful thing is that this search site is extraordinarily simple; all you get is a field into which you can type your keywords. There's none of the other baloney that clutters up the home pages on most search engines.
Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com) offers some interesting features. For example, you can view your search results grouped according to categories and domain name so that, for example, any hits from anywhere in the www.komando.com domain are all grouped together.
What really sets Northern Light apart, though, is its Special Collection. This is a collection of some 2 million articles from more than 3,400 publications. If you've exhausted other online resources, the Special Collection may have just what you're looking for. There's just one hitch. The search results display a brief synopsis of each Special Collection article. If you want to read the whole article, you'll have to pay anywhere from $1 to $4.
Looking for late-breaking news? There are a number of sources available on the Web. For example, many local newspapers have searchable online editions and archives and search engines like Yahoo offer news search capabilities too. But if you want more, you need to go somewhere that specializes.
The most comprehensive news search site that I've discovered so far is NewsHub (http://www.newshub.com/). Updated every 15 minutes every day, NewsHub draws from an impressive list of sources and presents them on screen sorted by topics including financial, health, science, entertainment, technical and general world and U.S.
Certainly, the Web offers information but don't neglect the Usenet newsgroups. When you consider that there are now over 30,000 newsgroups, it becomes clear that trying to track down all the information on any one topic would be nearly impossible. That is, unless you use a search engine specializing in newsgroup searches.
Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com) brings a Web interface to searching Usenet newsgroups. Just type in a keyword or two and Deja News finds any recent newsgroup postings that relate to your topic, no matter which newsgroup they happen to be in.
Much like Deja News, Reference.Com (http://www.reference.com) allows you to search newsgroups. Reference.Com offers a newsgroup twist, though. If you register at the site, you're given the option of storing queries at no charge. You can then run these queries at your convenience, or set them up to run automatically so that the results are emailed to you.
One common way to participate in online discussions is through what are collectively known as mailing lists. Here's how a mailing list works: First, you subscribe to a list that addresses a topic you're interested in. Upon doing so, you'll begin to receive any and all e-mail messages sent to the list server by other subscribers. If you have something to say, you e-mail you comments to the list server and the server resends your message to all the other subscribers.
Participating in a mailing list is easy. The hard part is finding one that interests you--unless of course you use a search engine that deals exclusively with mailing lists. There are a few of them out there, but my favorite is called Liszt (http://www.liszt.com).
The last time I checked, Liszt had indexed nearly 85,000 mailing lists, all searchable through a standard keyword interface. One warning: subscribing to more than a handful of mailing lists is one way to get far too much email to handle.
Most search sites offer detailed documentation to help you fine-tune results. It's time well-spent learning how each site offers simple and advanced searching.
Generally, if you are looking for an exact phrase, put the phrase in quotes. For example, a song lyrics search might include "don't step on my blue suede shoes."
Use only lower case unless you want your search to be case sensitive. And don't forget, that you can also use Boolean phrases such as and, not, or and near to pinpoint information.
As time goes by, you're likely to find more and more specialized search engines for every imaginable topic. For example, while surfing the Web the other day, I discovered '80s Search (http://www.80s.com/Search), billed as "the first search engine that searches exclusively for 1980s information on the Web." I always wondered what happened to the B-52s.
Copyright ©1998, The Komando Corporation. All rights reserved. Kim Komando is a syndicated talk radio host, Computer Editor Popular Mechanics and author. Visit Kim on the Internet at http://www.komando.com.