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Finding Information on the Internet
The main problem for you on the Internet will not be finding information, but rather finding the information you want. This cannot be said too often. There is so much information on the Web that you could spend the rest of your life looking at it and never see it all, especially because more is being added every second!
Back to basics: what is a search engine? As stated above, it is a program, resident on the Internet and available (in most cases, except specialized databases such as scholarly journals) to the Web public to help them find what they are looking for. And by now, you may have asked yourself why people would offer these programs for free. The answer is that they don't--you don't pay, but these sites are supported by advertising. On every commercial web page you go to, all search engines, and even some personal sites, you will see ads. Read them or ignore them, just as you do ads in other media.
Search Engine programs were developed from software used to spot anomalies in credit card use--has your credit card issuer ever called you and asked if you really used your card in New York yesterday? Mine too. Anyway, some bright individual saw a use for this kind of software, to locate patterns of information on the Web. And that's all a search engine does--find and store the location of patterns of information on the Web, for retrieval by the entry of keywords, which are words that you enter to indicate your topic. You'll see an example in a few paragraphs.
Search engines all do that one simple thing--location and retrieval--differently, and some do it better than others. But every search engine (and there are dozens, if not hundreds), offers information. Think of a search engine as an index card file in a library, only not so well organized. Yes, I know that libraries have databases now. You can compare it to that too--I'm of the index-card generation!
Yahoo was one of the first search engines, and one I still use frequently. Yahoo employs real people--as opposed to software search programs--who look at every site they post in their index. That means that you generally get more relevant "hits," or listings, from Yahoo than from some others. Infoseek, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, and many others populate the Web, selling advertising and offering to help you. Each has a specialty, and the newest trend is offering value-added content, like headline news and online games. As you use them you'll determine which are right for you and your subject matter.
Speaking of subject matter, let me reiterate here that the Web is full of profane language and pornography. The most innocent search can produce results with listings you may not care to see. But since you don't have to go to those pages, you can censor yourself on the Web very effectively. Check out
Protecting your children on the Internet for more information on that topic.Back to searching--let's use Yahoo for our first example. Suppose you wanted to find information on Rottweilers. You go to
Yahoo and enter the keyword "Rottweiler" in the search pane--and you get a listing of seven categories and 179 sites. So you start reading through the descriptions, and you realize that what you really want is breed information on temperament and physical conformation. So you change your search keywords to "rottweiler temperament physical characteristics" (searches, like most everything else on the Web, are not case-sensitive, which means that they don't care whether or not you use upper- or lower-case letters), and you get a listing for Child Psychology. Oops, not what you wanted. So you go back and refine the search, perhaps by enclosing the words "rottweiler" and "temperament" in quotation marks to make the search engine think they are a string, or series of words that must be found in order and together. No results. A collection of keywords is, by the way, called a search string. Search strings can be one or a dozen words long, depending on what you're trying to find.Back to our search now. I decided that "rottweiler temperament physical characteristics" was too much, and the search engine might not find all that on one page, so I shortened it to "rottweiler temperament," NOT enclosed in quotes, and found exactly what I was looking for, five sites with good information. Of course, along the way I might have found pages for doggie goodies, some ads I wanted to look at, and many other diversions. The main problem on the Web is to stay focused! (Unless of course you don't want to, or have some spare time.) And leave enough time to find what you want---searches take time, and loading web pages takes time, and you will get frustrated if you're up against a clock while you're on the Internet!
There's a second sort of search tool, called a metacrawler or web spider. Several examples are Hotbot, Dogpile, and Ask Jeeves. These tools combine the results from two or more search engines (up to a dozen or more) so that you get many more listings. You will find through trial and error that search engines do not contain the same listings, and sometimes the same search engine lists hits in a different order the second time around. Don't be surprised by anything you find on the Web! It's an imperfect environment, but it's still wonderful.
A metacrawler will give you many listings compared to Yahoo (although Yahoo may be included as one of the metacrawler's sources). For example, I went to
Hotbot, which is my favorite metacrawler, and did the same search as above. I got 7,748 hits from Hotbot, far too many to go through. But with Hotbot, I have several choices. I can go to the "Top Ten Sites" for whatever my search string was, or I can page through the first few listings, which are given in order of relevance to the topic. For more information about using Hotbot, or any metacrawler or search engine, please look at its Help. It's a very useful tool!I could talk about search engines all day, but what I'd like you to do now is to read the document above entitled
"Seven Habits of Effective Searchers." and then try a search for yourself. You might go to Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and try a search for your favorite hobby. Get some practice in searching, because on the Internet, practice truly does make perfect, or at least makes one more effective. NOTHING on the Internet is perfect, but it's better than anything ever seen before for sheer quantity and quality of information.Once you are comfortable with the concept of searching, please take the
Quiz for this Unit. You might want to print out the quiz, and write in the URLS while you're completing it (it's a scavenger hunt), then transfer them to an email. You can also find your location through Yahoo, click on it to go to the site (don’t just copy the address from Yahoo), then click on its address, click Edit and Copy, then Paste it right into your email to me. All URLS requested in the quiz can be found through Yahoo--you just have to think about what you're searching for! So be patient, and don't expect to become an accomplished researcher on the Internet in one day. The Internet is the embodiment of the phrase "lifelong learning." It'll take a while to get really good at searching the Web!Kim Komando, a syndicated columnist, gives us more information about searching the web and the individual search engines in her
article. Check it out! See you in Unit 3, Email.Back to
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