Improve your Internet search skills
The Internet is vast, and learning how to search effectively
is the key to getting the most from it.
Searching the Internet today is, fairly easy compared to the way it
used to be. Usually one types a name into a directory site like
Yahoo! or a search engine like AltaVista and waits for the results.
But there's much more to it than that. There are alternative search
engines, Email directories and so on, and knowing how to make use of
them can be a great timesaver.
Many of these search engines contain useful power-search commands
which you can either use to narrow down the range of 'hits' returned,
or expand the range of sites you search for.
It's also useful to have a search strategy in mind prior to embarking
on a particularly complicated exercise. This need not involve much
more than knowing which sites are best to begin with, but it can also
take into account methods of widening searches, lateral thinking and
knowing a little about how search engines work so you can be sure you
will get the best results.
1. Yahoo!
The best place to start a general search is probably using the
directory Yahoo!
Yahoo! searches can be improved by clicking on the Options link next
to the Search button or by using its advanced search syntax. The
control codes you can input affect what results are returned, and
it’s possible to use a combination of these codes in the same search:
+ Placing a plus sign before a
word means it will be returned in every search.
eg. Microsoft + Windows will
return any phrase containing the words Microsoft and Windows.
- Placing
a minus sign before a word means results containing the word will
not be returned.
eg. New Zealand - North Island
will return references to New Zealand which have nothing to do with
North Island
t: will return search
results by title only, leaving out categories and descriptions.
eg. t: The Press
u: will only return URLs, rather
than the full description.
eg. u: Rutherford.
“...” Placing quotation
marks around a phrase ensures that Yahoo! will only return those
results which match the phrase you've typed.
eg. “Nobody ever got into trouble by
keepin’ his mouth shut”
* is a wildcard operator and will return
rough matches.
eg. Motor* will return any word
starting with 'Motor' - whether it's 'Motorcars' or 'Motorola'.
2. More thorough searches using AltaVista
If Yahoo! is unable to help, there are other Web sites which offer different,
search-based approaches. The best of these is AltaVista (www.altavista.digital.com).
Advanced searching within AltaVista is trickier, since the engine is
so powerful.
Selecting the Advanced Search option brings up a series of boxes into
which your search queries are entered - the one we are interested in
here is labelled Selection Criteria. You can modify a search using
the typical binary operators like AND, OR,
NOT and NEAR,
and use parentheses to ensure you get the correct logic. Be careful
to place phrases within quotation marks, so that the whole phrase is
found, not just the individual words.
For example, "Nobody ever got into
trouble by keepin’ his mouth shut" OR Forest Gump; Telecom
AND Communication; "Himalayas"
AND NOT Everest (it is
important to include the AND); Intel
NEAR Pentium (if the two keywords are found within ten
words of each other, they will be returned); and the more complicated ((Einstein
AND Relativity) OR (Einstein AND "Quantum
Theory")) AND NOT "Atomic bomb".
Don't panic.
The trouble with AltaVista is that it can take you ages to wade
through the results of a search, as so many links can appear.
Thankfully there's a way to ensure that the keywords you are most
interested in appear near the top. Enter keywords in the Selection Criteria
box as before but in the box labelled Results Ranking Criteria,
enter the word you are most interested in and the appropriate
results will appear first in the list.
For example, Selection Criteria: Electronics
AND Computers. Results Ranking: Computers.
All the references to Computers that are found will appear at
the top of the list.
3. Searching for individuals
Unfortunately, there is not yet any central email directory like
there is for the telephone, and it's unlikely there will ever be a
comprehensive one. So it's very much a case of making the best of
what we've got.
The first and most obvious place to check is one of the many
existing, although incomplete, directories around. Generally,
the best is Infoseek
, although increasingly there are country-specific directories listed
within Yahoo!
Bigfoot,
although it takes a while to load, is quite comprehensive. Some email
directories need to have their addresses registered by hand, however,
Bigfoot crawls the Net looking for addresses itself.
Also, just started in New Zealand is Telecom’s Yellow
Pages
Remember that many Internet users are on-line through providers.
These service providers usually do not enable public access to their
email directories. All you can really do is hope that such users send
email outside of their services, and that it has been picked up by
one of the email directories.