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What is a
search engine? Strategies
for searching Using Alta Vista Using
Yahoo!
Whatever you're seeking, it is on the Net. And knowing
how to use sophisticated Web sites called `search
engines' will help you find it.
There are three basic types of search engines:
1. Word searchers, such as Alta Vista (at www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au) come up with all the sites that contain any mention of a word or combinations of words you query. If you want to find every site that mentions the name of a specific product or a particular phrase, use a word searcher engine. The downside is if you just have a general concept in mind, such as 'computers', you can be flooded with several thousand hits. Furthermore, these engines need considerable hardware investment to keep up with the boom of new pages coming on the Net and can be out-of-date by up to three months or more.
2. Directories such as Yahoo! (at http://www.yahoo.com) offer a structured top-down view of the resources of the Net. If you want to know what's on the Internet concerning certain generic issues, such as sports or transport, a cataloguer is the way to go. Be aware though, there are no Internet cataloguing standards like a Dewey library system being observed and you are a hostage to how well the catalogue headings fit with your needs.
3. Rating services such as Pointcom's `Top Five
Percent' of the Net (at point.lycos.com/categories) claim
to evaluate and highlight the cream of the sites.
To make the most of these sites, you should learn the three strategies of effective Internet searchers.
1. Collect and refine several search engines. There is a mini-industry in developing faster, smarter and more comprehensive search engines. There is a surprising number of really good search engines around that are little known -- at least for now.
Experienced Internet searchers have a bookmark with a sub-heading called search engines, with up to 20 or more to use.
Alta Vista and Yahoo are hard to beat as general ways of scouting the Net. However, not everything on the Net will be found through these engines. There is usually a delay of about two to three months between a Web page of information appearing and its being recorded in the database index of search engines like Alta Vista.
Furthermore, some of the most valuable sites generate pages from special databases. These pages generate HTML pages `on the fly' or in response to your request.
In short, you need to identify and find sites that have specialised databases that are relevant to your field.
How do you find such search engines? There are two main ways. First use your current search engine to search the Web. Use terms like 'search engine', 'discovery', 'directory' etc and see what comes up.
With search engines, be as specific as possible when typing in keywords. Otherwise, you'll get a lot of information you don't want. Keywords are fallible. If one keyword fails to find the document you're looking for, try another.
The second way is to pay attention to news forums concerned with developments on the Net. The two most indispensable newsgroups for this are comp.infosystems.www.announce and comp.internet.net-happenings.
Each weekday both offer details of up to 100 new sites. If you focus on search engines or discovery tools, you are ahead of the game.
The essence of the strategy is to be dynamic in collecting, refining and discarding search tools.
2. Planning. The more you search, the more you become aware of certain tricks and shortcuts for your field. You develop a set of custom reference sites and bookmarks.
If you want to know the gross national product of Zaire, you could try using Yahoo.
A better approach is to have available a specialist Geographical/Economic resource for these issues. The one that I would use is the CIA's World Factbook 1995 (www.odci.gov/cia/publications/95fact).
In my field, I sometimes get an assignment to interview some visiting boffin or marketing heavy from an overseas computer company I've never heard of. I have learned that there are certain killer computer press sites that have searchable databases of their magazines. I actually have a list of 10 I check daily.
A good, though somewhat busy, site is CMP Publications Techweb archive search (www.techweb.com).
3. Identify and cultivate the search gurus. We can't really be Internet search freaks all the time. We have a life (don't we?).
In those circumstances, you should maintain a short list of really hot people that you can rely on when things get really tough.
There is always someone that is more expert than you about finding things on the Net. You should attempt to form alliances with such people wherever possible.
It's called networking. Despite all the tools
available one good phone call or e-mail can open up a
lead.
King of the heap for relentless searching is Alta Vista. It actually trawls the World Wide Web and newsgroups and indexes every single word into a massive computer database that is constantly increasing and changing.
Alta Vista gives you access to the largest Web index -- 30 million pages on 275,600 servers, and three million articles from 14,000 Usenet newsgroups. It is accessed over 16 million times per weekday.
You should learn to use both the simple and advanced query functions to get the most out of Alta Vista. For example, to get Alta Vista to find every page that uses the expression "once in a blue moon", you input it in quotes. Alta Vista assumes that lower-case includes upper-case, but not vice versa.
To confine your search to Australian sites with Alta Vista, add host:au to your query in quotes, thus: "once in a blue moon" host:au.
If you prefer using
boolean language, for example, expressions that include
AND, OR, NOT and NEAR, use Alta Vista's advanced query
option.
The other key search engine to learn is Yahoo! Begun as a courageous attempt to catalogue the Web by subject, Yahoo has matured into a superior tool for `drilling down' for the information you're looking for. Just choose the category that most closely matches the topic that you're looking for and then search from there.
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All text © 1997 Australian Consolidated Press - PC User Magazine