Infoseek

Infoseek

Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) combines a powerful search engine (such as Lycos and AltaVista) with a large Web directory (such as Yahoo!). On its basic search screen, you can enter search keywords or select from any of dozens of categories.

Given two equally good tools at this site, which should you use? As with Yahoo!, it depends on what kind of information you are looking for. If you want to find all instances of specific words, and the context doesn't matter, use the search engine. To find all information about a specific bookstore, for example, search for the name as a keyword. To find a list of bookstores in your area, however, use the categories:
Arts --> Books --> Bookstores -->

The standard search engine on Infoseek is called UltraSmart. It's the simple search form. There is also UltraSeek, a more powerful form you can access by clicking the UltraSeek button on the page.

As with the other search engines, there is syntax you can use to narrow down your searches on Infoseek. Click the Tips link on the Infoseek page to learn all about it through the Help system. Following are the highlights:

Use commas to separate phrases. For example, if you are searching for Shetland Sheepdogs or Rottweilers, use Shetland Sheepdog, Rottweiler.
Use quotation marks or hyphens to show words that must be adjacent. For example, to search for New Riders Publishing as a phrase, use "New Riders Publishing" or New-Riders-Publishing.
Put a minus sign in front of a word that must not appear. For example, to search for Hudson but not the Hudson River, use Hudson �River. Make sure you leave a space before the minus sign, or the search engine may think you want the phrase "Hudson River", as in the preceding example!
Put a plus sign in front of a word that must appear. For example, to find information about Dalmatians' care or breeding, use +Dalmatians, care, breeding.

You can also perform advanced field searching with Infoseek, such as finding text only in links or only in URLs. For complete information about this, see http://www.infoseek.com/Help?pg-fields.html.

More is Better!

In this article, you're learning how to use several of the major search sites, not just one or two. Why would you want to use more than one search engine? Well, as I explained in the sidebar earlier about bots, each search site has its own bots that roam the Internet and collect the addresses of sites. Different bots go different places, so each search site will give a different list of hits for particular keywords. There will likely be a lot of overlap, but not 100 percent overlap, since one site's bots have been to different places than another site's.