Internet Tips & Tricks
By MARK DAVIS
General Manager, CommSpeed Internet Service
President, Prescott Computer Society
Visit the Computer Society Website
www.prescottcomputersociety.org
 Finding
STUFF on the Web
With billions of web
pages online, you could spend a lifetime surfing the
Web, following links from one page to another. Amusing
perhaps, but not very efficient if you are after some
specific information. Where do you start? Searching the
Internet requires part skill, part luck and a little bit
of art. Thank goodness, a number of free online
resources help with the hunt.
You've probably heard
of Yahoo!, Google, and AltaVista. There are dozens of
these tools to help you locate what you're looking for.
The trick is understanding how they work, so you can
use the right tool for the job.
Search engines break
down into two categories -- directories and
indexes. Directories, such
as
Yahoo!, are
good at identifying general information. Like a card
catalog in a library, they classify websites into
similar categories, such as accounting firms, English
universities and natural history museums. The results
of your search will be a list of websites related to
your search term. For instance, if you are looking for
the Louvre museum website, use a directory.
But what if you want
specific information, such as biographical information
about Leonardo da Vinci? Web indexes are the way to go,
because they search all the contents of a website.
Indexes use software programs called spiders and
robots that scour the Internet, analyzing
millions of web pages and newsgroup postings and
indexing all of the words.
Indexes like
AltaVista
and
Google find individual pages of a website
that match your search criteria, even if the site itself
has nothing to do with what you are looking for. You can
often find unexpected gems of information this way, but
be prepared to wade through a lot of irrelevant
information too.
Search results may be
ranked in order of relevancy -- the number of times your
search term appears in a document--or how closely the
document appears to match a concept you have entered.
This is a much more thorough way to locate what you
want.
If you are looking for
news articles, try these sites:
www.findarticles.com and
http://news.google.com
Happy
Searching!
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