Simplify Altavista's Search Syntax Please
If you happen to land on the correct World Wide Web search page from the list of oodles available
, you can reach Japan faster through a picture than move about your house looking for a checkbook.
They are practically the same, appearance and mechanics, go to the search engine's Web page, key in descriptive words to what you need, and as a result you get a display of links to other Web pages that might have the answers.
It is of foremost importance, however, that you understand the difference between the two prime movers of Web searching tools, and those are directories and search engines.
Yahoo is a site directory, and they are lists updated and managed by people and they are focused on varied topics. Spiders and Crawlers trawl the Web and index the text and topic of pages, and they are the reason why search engines like AltaVista can function automatically in assembling their listings.
Directories are outdone by search engines by a great deal, the latter having usually 30 to 50 million pages.
Knowing when to best use a certain classification of finding tool is a very helpful art to learn. Yahoo is best at getting you started with broad searches like Oregon or the history of the Korean War. When your goal is no find a topic that is really tapered and concealed, you can choose search engines because they can search the entire
If in doubt, use search engines. Their vast breadth highly competent search tools will definitely be more advantageous than any of the directories available, in any given branch of subject.
We analyzed five of the biggest engines, AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek and Lycos, and saw them in action as they answer practical questions.
The most accessible way to begin to know if they can satisfy your questions is to bookmark them and investigate how they work. Suit yourself and bring a phone and a map to your neighborhood library just in case you run out of resources. I assure you of not creating an issue when you tell your friends you got all then on Web.
It won't rank at the top of the most complete nor the most powerful, but Infoseek is the handiest to search everyday things when you are trying to avoid complex queries. It has a way of serving searchers what they really need and it is one of the minorities which adhere with practical and conversational English searching.
It was not too difficult for Infoseek to figure out that my search needs Gap.Com when I sought for a particular clothing brand, something all the other search engines missed out.
Oftentimes you will be able to tell a portion of a web address or you will know that certain phrases will lead you to the page you were looking for.
HotBot gives permission for its searchers to make their queries bounded by the use of simplified drop down menus and on screen buttons.
For illustration, just a quick clicking here and there can make your search bounded to include only sites with the phrase fast forward, do not have the phrase tape deck, do belong to educational sites with addresses ending in .edu, and do have a creation date that does not go beyond the last six months.
More searchers will benefit from AltaVista if they make their syntax less incomprehensible. A flood of irrelevant hits will drown you if you do not specify any restrictions to the search word you key in. Once you become skilled with it, finding the geocities site that talk about newspapers instead of books will now be no sweat to you.
Hundreds of results are what you get from a broad search and Excite offers its sort by site function to separate unnecessary hits at a shorter time. This notion based search software that they have, however, only works out at its prime when it comes to judging the category into which your search falls.
Lycos also have this issue of zooming in more into the searchers' keywords than only beneficial, only to give out sites with no relevance to the search terms. It is too heavy on the design and it is next to impossible to search even for a personal email address because of the esoteric search syntax. But if you need sounds and pictures, give it a try.
by: John Chambers
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