What's Available?

What's Available?

There are hundreds of search sites on the Internet, but the "big players," the ones that get the lion's share of the business, are the following:

Lycos�http://www.lycos.com
Yahoo!�http://www.yahoo.com
AltaVista�http://www.altavista.digital.com
Infoseek�http://www.infoseek.com
Excite�http://www.excite.com
Magellan�http://www.mckinley.com
The NRP Yellow Pages�http://www.mcp.com/nrp/wwwyp

These top six represent two kinds of search sites: search engines and Web directories. With a search engine, you type in what you want to search for, and the system consults an index of the Web and pulls up addresses for all pages that match your search. In contrast, a Web directory lists categories from which you can select. You choose a category, then a narrower one, and so on, until you have narrowed down what you want to a list of a few sites. Both methods are useful, and some sites combine the two technologies, as you will shortly see.

Note:

If you don't find what you want at any of these sites, visit Netscape's Net Search page for links to other search sites, including specialized ones for businesses, individuals, files, and so on. If you use Netscape Navigator as your browser, you can move quickly to this page by clicking the Net Search button on your screen.

Each search site is a little different. The basic procedure for using each one is the same, but when you get into the more complicated stuff, like entering complex search criteria, each site has its own rules. (We'll get into that in the sections that follow for the individual sites.) If you don't have this book handy when you're using a site, refer to the online instructions or Help document for each search engine.

How DO Those Search Engines Get the Site Listings?

There are many ways that a search engine site comes up with their listings, but one of the coolest is through the use of bots. You can think of bots as Internet robot surfers that travel the Internet, constantly checking out sites and recording information for their masters. (Remember Voyager in the Star Trek episode and the second Star Trek movie? Kind of like that.) They make a note of the page's address and keywords, and send it back home for inclusion in the index. This is great because no human could ever keep up with all the millions of pages and their ever-changing addresses.

The reason a page's address or description in the index may not be up-to-date might be that the bot has not been back to visit that page again since its address or content changed.

Note:

bots�Internet robot surfers that travel the Internet, constantly checking out sites and recording information for their masters.

Lycos

As we enter the world of cyberspace searching, we'll start with my personal favorite search engine, Lycos.

Lycos offers two levels of searching: basic and custom. You start out at the basic level, where you can type one or more words to search for. For example, suppose that I was looking for Shetland Sheepdog information. I would type Shetland Sheepdog in the text box, and then click the Go Get It button. The results appear on a new page.

Notice that Lycos found 2074 pages that matched Shetland, Sheepdog, or a variation of one of those words. Because Lycos arranges the found pages by the quality of the match, the pages that contain both Shetland and Sheepdog appear first�which is good because then I don't have to wade through pages on Shetland ponies and English Sheepdogs.

Note:

To return to the controls and enter different criteria, just click the Back button on your browser.

For many people, the basic Lycos search is all they will ever need. However, experienced users may prefer to use the Custom Search instead. To move to that screen, click the Custom Search button on the basic search page (or jump to it from anywhere on the Web). You have a lot of extra options for refining your search here.

Following are the available Custom Search choices:

Search�You can choose The Web, Pictures, Sounds, or By Subject. You also have this choice on the basic search page. I usually leave this set to The Web since I am almost always looking for Web pages.
For�This is the same text box as on the basic search page, where you enter the word(s) to search for.
Search options�There are two:
Number of terms to match The default is Match any term (OR), which is the same as the basic search does, but you can choose a specific number of terms or Match all terms (AND).
Match quality The default is Loose match, which is the same as for the basic search. This allows the most leeway in searching. You can be stricter about how relevant a page has to be to your keyword by choosing one of the other match types (Fair, Good, Close, or Strong).
Display options�again, there are two:
Results per page The default is 10 (same as for basic searches), but you can choose 20, 30, or 40. The more results per page you specify, the longer the page takes to appear.
Results The default is Standard, which provides a few lines about each site, but you can choose Summary (shorter descriptions) or Detailed (longer descriptions).

Is that all? Well, almost. There are some symbols you can enter with your search terms to narrow down the results to exactly what you want:

Place a minus sign before a word to exclude it. For example, to search for banks (financial institutions), I would want to exclude other meanings of "bank," so I might enter banks �river.
Put a period after a word for an exact match. For example, to search for bank but not banker or banking, I might enter bank. in the text box.
Use a dollar sign to indicate a fragment. For example, gard$ would find pages containing gardener, gardenia, gardens, and so on.

Further Information

Yahoo!	AltaVista	Infoseek
Excite	Magellan	The NRP World Wide Web Yellow Pages
Macmillan Publishing's SuperSeek	Other Search Sites