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| Floyd's Beginners Guide to
Searching |
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The Internet is one of the largest and widely used resources to look
for information on almost any topic. The problem with the Internet is that
information is everywhere, and people keep on adding more to it all the time.
As opposed to a nice, quiet library, information on the Internet is not
always stored in a specific order or place. Luckily, there are many tools for
finding what you are looking for at your disposal and tricks for helping you
find it faster.
Search engines
Search engines are the
most important of tools available to you on the Internet. They all work
differently, but they all act in the same way: when you search for a keyword,
they will provide you with a variety of links that contain that word. If you
know how a specific search engine works, then you will know which one to visit
depending on the information you are searching for.
Here are the most
popular, and how they work:
Yahoo: if you don't know exactly what you are
looking for and need a guiding hand, go to Yahoo! This is a great list-based
search engine organized by category. You can search by keyword, but the real
fun of this search engine is that the webmasters classify the sites by subject.
Altavista: Altavista is a keyword based search
engine and tends to serve up a lot more sites, but they are not organized in
terms of subject. If you type in three key words (such as recipe, mexican and
rice), you will be delivered as many web sites as they can find with any of
those three words in it. The first ones you will find would include all three
words. AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024
characters and works best when the web site has META tags.
Webcrawler:
WebCrawler is also a keyword based search engine, and will index every word in
a home page up to 1MB of text (that's a lot of text!).
Other important
search engines:
http://www.google.com/
http://www.excite.com/
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.hotbot.com/
http://www.infoseek.com/
Most Search engines can be used to find web sites in almost any
language, however there are some search engines to access information in a
particular language.
Your best bet? If you have time, try your search
in different search engines to see what you get!
Using a search
engine
In order to get the most from a search engine, there are
some tips you might be able to use: type
the "Keyword(s)" or the title you think will be within the web page(s) you are
looking for, then click the "Search" button. By doing that the engine looks
through the list of all the web pages and newsgroups that contain these words
and gives you a link to these pages. "Keywords" are words that are precise to
the subject of your search. For this reason, it is important to be as exact as
possible when using one.
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Floyd's Surfing Tips
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