subject: Vital Concepts to Understand Before Getting Acquainted with Web Searching [print this page] Vital Concepts to Understand Before Getting Acquainted with Web Searching
The distance between places within your house may seem bigger compared to cross continents once you pick out the most appropriate World Wide Web for your search. 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. Once a good comprehension of the difference between the two principal kinds of Web finding tools, search engines and directories, is attained, the first step of the basics is completed.
Yahoo, just like the rest of its site directory friends, are lists of Web sites and human editors are their superheroes keeping them safe from dumbness. Search engines like Alta vista gain ability to gather a huge amount of information from the entire web without human intervention and subsequently index them through brilliant programs called spiders and crawlers. With 30 million to 50 million indexed directories, search engines have undoubtedly more storage than do web directories.
Knowing when to best use a certain classification of finding tool is a very helpful art to learn. Most researches start with a wide information category like Oregon or history of the Korean War, where you will need to see several pages speaking about them, and these are the best times to use yahoo. 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
Most of the time, you should use search engines. Their comprehensiveness and powerful search tools will prove much more useful than any one directory might be in finding the big name sites in any single category of interest. To learn how they go about daily life questions, we checked five of the biggest engines, AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Info Seek, and Lycos.
The fastest way to know if they are the ones you need is to label them and see how they work. Go ahead and carry a phone or a map to the nearest resource you may find handy in case you get puzzled along the way. That is alright because there is no problem telling everybody you got it all from the Web.
It's neither the most complete nor the most powerful, but Infoseek is the easiest to use for day to day searching when you don't want to spend time crafting elaborate queries. It is included in the few sites that follow plain English searching in whatever productive way and by being able to tell what your search wants, it can even go ahead of the others. When all other search engines threw all different answers to me, Infoseek knew that Gap.Com was the site I needed for my clothing brand search.
Frequently, you can figure out half of a site's address, or you will be able to tell that particular phrases can only be present in the site you are searching. HotBot makes it possible for users to demarcate their searches using simplistic pull down menus and on screen buttons. Educational sites addresses that end in .edu and were created in the last six months can further be restricted with a few mouse clicks that include choices to fast forward and not include phrase tape deck.
The unintelligible syntax of AltaVista gets in the way of its powerful potential as a search engine. A flood of irrelevant hits will drown you if you do not specify any restrictions to the search word you key in. Once you master that however, it's possible to find say, pages at the geocities site that mention newspapers, but not books, and are linked to the New York Time's page, but not the Washington post's site.
It is highly probable that you will be swamped by a hundred of results if you are face with a broad search, so Excite has a sort by site function to help you take out residue off this list and just bring out what you really will need. However, their idea based search software functions accordingly only at gauging what types of data you want.
A major flaw of Lycos is going over the searcher's queries more than necessary ending up with unrelated results. This search engine is suffering from an exaggerated graphic design and exaggeratedly complex search syntax that searching for an individual's email address is not feasible. Do use it, however, if sounds and pictures are important to you.
