Search Engines and their use

Are you confused by all the places to visit on the Internet? Are you lost in the vast oceans of information? Up the creek without a paddle? Well let me suggest some solutions, simple but effective methods to cruising on the Internet with little pain.

Starting Point pages:

On these pages you will find links to a variety of subjects such as: news, weather, sports, entertainment, business, shopping, travel, electronic magazines and education. Some of the better ones are Nerd World ( http://www.nerdworld.com/ ) , Smart Business (fomer PC Computing) ( http://blogs.zdnet.com/ ). Try webcrawler ( http://www.webcrawler.com/ ) with a simple user interface.

Subject Trees

Subject trees are sites that attempt to categorize web documents by subject. They contain active links to the documents they index. They try to be comprehensive but only a small fraction of the material on the Internet is covered.

When you have reached the subject tree click on the subject heading that best describes your area of interest. This will lead you to further, related headings until you come to a page that lists interesting hyper links. Just click on one that looks interesting and have a look. Use the back button on the browser to return to the list of hyper links.

The distributed subject tree sites are an effort to break down the vast repositories of data into small bites. One person or one organization maintains a page in his or her area of expertise.

Other subject trees provide a search capacity within their respective pages to enable you to quickly find an area of interest to you. Subject trees to get you started are; BUBL ( http://www.bubl.ac.uk/ ) which list academic source documents on a wide variety of subjects.

www.Yahoo.com (Yet Another Hierarchically Odiferous Oracle)is another well known example of a subject tree. * ArgusClearinghouse ( http://www.clearinghouse.net/ ) How do you find material on the various search engines, and what do you do if you have a list of several thousand documents. You can narrow down your number of documents by using Boolean Operators. Boolean operators are words one can use to refine a search for a topic and make it more specific to your needs. What are the Boolean operators? They are connecting words AND, OR, and NOT that are used to indicate the relationship between or among words.

The Boolean operator that I use most often is AND. When you tie several Booleans together you (i.e. auto AND engine AND diesel) would find all documents that contain the words: auto, engine, diesel.

If you wish to broaden your search, if the list the search generated was too few than you should try OR. The Boolean OR tells the search engine to show you any documents that contain any of the key words you have typed (i.e. widgets or carriages) This would give you all documents that contain the words widgets or carriages.

Sometimes, when you retrieve a number of documents, you notice that some of the material is not related to what you searched for. The NOT operator provides a way to exclude some of these documents (i.e. Rock NOT music NOT Roll) would tell the search engine you only want material on Rocks but not music and not rock and roll. As you scan the documents you have retrieved you may want to eliminate more extraneous material by reformatting your search query.

A number of different "Trail Blazer pages" reside on the Internet but one only learns about them through word of mouth, mentions in various magazines, newspapers or books. A particularly good book is Web Search Strategies by Bryan Pfaffenberger published by MIS Press , 1996. It may be available at your Public Library or can be ordered through your local Book Store.

There are a number of specialized sites which can be used by persons with specific purposes or topics in mind. One of the better ones is ; Internet Public Library Reference Center ( http://www.ipl.org/ref/ ).

If you want help with your standard reference works try the Webster's dictionary ( http://www.m-w.com/netdict.htm ) ; or the on line computer term references at http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.htm

The CIA page ( http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.php ), can be tried for areas of wide interest. There are a fascinating variety of country maps; a short summary of the country's economic structure, their members of government, resources and ethic groups. You can spend hours determining what the CIA Knows (and wants to tell you) about each country. Curious about your own country? Visit Statistic Canada's own page http://www.statcan.ca/.

The last but not least site suggestion is a site where you can read the various translations of the Bible in English ( http://www.biblegateway.com/) or the foreign language of your choice.