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Thinkydink Guide to Searching the Web
Why Search the Web? What is a Search Engine? Performing a Basic Search Refining Your Search Some Good Engines to Try Local Searches The World Wide Web is an incredible resource and respository of information. Whatever obscure, esoteric or oddball thing you're interested in, you can find whole sites dedicated to that thing. Most newspapers and magazines have website versions available with some or all of their content viewable for free. All universities have websites, and you'd be surprised how accessible and responsive college professors can be when you email them a sincere question about their field of expertise. Some of the most renowned museums and art galleries have websites, allowing you to view their collections from your PC. The web has a far greater variety and amount of material than any one library can offer, and yet it's very easy to find something specific.
Another plus of the web is that when you want a copy of something from the web, you can instantly print it out or save it to your computer's hard drive. The library can't beat that. But perhaps most importantly, most everything that's intended for public consumption on the web is indexed by keywords and titles to make finding things easier. It's much more effective than your library's card file.
A search engine is a program that works like an electronic index card file. If you've looked up help for a computer program using a "lookup" or "find" function, you were using a search engine. Search engines on the web work in the same manner, but where your help tool only scans the content of its own program, web search engines scan the many thousands of registered pages on the web.
Each time a web page is built, the person building it has the option to enter "keywords" into the header of the page. The header, which isn't visible on the page itself, stores behind-the-scenes information about the page and sometimes programming code as well. The keywords stored in the page header are accessed by some search engines, which use them like lookup keys. Other search engines will scan the whole body of the page, possibly bypassing the keywords altogether.
When the author of the web page registers his site with a given search engine, his pages become part of the large catalog of material to be scanned when anyone uses that search engine to look for content on the web. The author must register his site with as many engines as possible to ensure that people who are looking for material like his will find his site no matter which search engine they use.
Performing a basic search is pretty simple. Select the search engine you want to use and go to that website. Look at Some Good Engines to Try for links to several of the most popular ones. At the engine site, you'll be presented with a blank search field for entry of keywords. If you were searching for information about Elvis, for instance, you would simply enter the word, "Elvis" in the search field and hit Enter or click "Search", as shown in the example below.
You should note a couple of things about this search page. First, notice how the search engine site is the address you see in the URL field (www.google.com) and that the search field is within the body of the page itself. Also note that the page contains links to some predefined searches: "Cool Jobs" and "Try our Web Directory". Most search engine sites have predefined links like these.
Now, what kinds of results do we get from running our search?
Our search found over 811,000 pages with the keyword "Elvis" in their headers, and it took only 1/2 a second. So you can see why it might be a good idea to refine our search. But before we do, notice some other things about this page. First, the search field stays at the top of the page as you look through your results; this enables you to enter a new search without having to go all the way back to the main search page. Most search engines have this feature. Also note the Advanced Search and Search Tips links above the search field. If your search didn't come up with what you were looking for, you can use links like these on most search engine sites to get some help with improving your search. Finally, the picture doesn't show this, but when you scroll to the bottom of each page of results you will find links to more pages of results; often there will be page number links and a "previous" and "next" link. You can use these links to page through the search results.
Refining Your Search. In our Elvis example, suppose you were actually looking for websites about Elvis Costello. When you want to search for two or more words all taken together, enclose them in quote marks, like this: "Elvis Costello". Otherwise, the search engine will look for any pages with the keywords, "Elvis", "Costello", and "Elvis Costello". The first word would take first priority, so your results would probably look the same as if you'd searched only on "Elvis", at least for the first several thousand pages of search results.
Suppose you wanted information about Elvis Presley, but you wanted to avoid looking at any pages having to do with his movie career or the Graceland mansion. You can exclude specific keywords by entering them after your primary search criteria and preceding them with a minus sign, as shown in the screen print below.
Now, what happens when this search is run?
The result set was cut almost in half, down from over 811,000 pages to 469,000 pages, and it took less than half a second. Notice the different result set, too. The fourth page shown is for Elvis Costello! You can tell that excluding keywords can give unexpected results, however. If you exclude all pages with the keywords "movie" or "graceland" from a search about Elvis Presley, you'll be excluding a lot of pages that probably have at least some content you would be interested in. If you're looking for something fairly specific within a very broad category, you may have to experiment with different combinations of searches to get the best result set.
There are a lot of great search engines out there; this list only includes the ones I use most often. It's important to remember that different pages can be registered with different search engines, so if you don't find what you need with one engine you should try some others. Even though your keyword search may stay the same, the result sets can vary from engine to engine, day to day, and even hour to hour.
Local Searches There are online yellow and white pages, people finders and predefined searches at just about every portal site, such as AOL.com, msn.com, yahoo.com and lycos.com. When you're searching for a local business or service, or trying to locate a person who isn't a celebrity, local searches will serve you much better than the standard search engine route.
The screen print below shows the AOL portal. Note the yellow pages, white pages, e-mail finder and map links at the bottom of the screen print. Also note that this portal, like most, even has its own search engine.
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