Searching 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're seeking some specific information. So where do you start? searching the Internet requires part skill, part luck and a little bit of art. Fortunately, a number of free online resources help with the hunt.

You've probably heard of search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and Ask.com. There are literally dozens of these tools to help you locate what you're looking for. The trick understands how they work so you can use the right tool for the job.

Search engines break down into two types: directories and indexes. Directories, such as Yahoo!, are good at identifying general information. Like a card catalog in a library, they classify websites into 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 natural history museums, you might use a directory to find it.

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 billions of web pages, newsgroup and blog postings, and indexing all of the words.

Indexes like Google and MSN Search identify the text on 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.

Now let's try using Google, an index-based Search engine. Once again, enter "San Francisco cable cars" in the search box. The Google Search results in over 1.5 million documents that match the search terms. Life is too short to comb through all these. The reason for this enormous list is that Google turns up every document that contains the words "San," "Francisco," "cable," and "cars."

To search for documents that contain just this phrase, use quotation marks around the terms ("San Francisco cable cars"). Doing this result in about 46,000 documents. Fortunately, Google smartly ranks sites in order of relevancy and popularity, so the first few have information about schedules.

But even better, try entering "San Francisco cable car schedule". Bingo! Now the list includes just 10 sites. As you can see, the more specific you can be with your search query, the more focused the results.

Ask.com uses a technology called natural language query, a fancy way of saying that you can ask your question in plain English. By typing a question like "What is the San Francisco cable car schedule?" you get a list of related pages. Once again, you will have to go to the site, but in this case, it's a no-brainer as one of the choices is "San Francisco Municipal Railway."

Bear in mind that websites tend to change often. These changes are not always reflected in the search engine database, particularly for directories. Typically, websites are registered with search engines when they first go online. After that, changes are not reported generally. To find the most recent information, your best bet is a search engine that use Web-indexing robots, software that constantly search the Internet , recording additions and changes.

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