| Tips on Searching |
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Nothing impresse's Web Searchers more than a Web Wizard who can find some specific data in 30 seconds flat---
There are many tips to use in searching. They are all designed to make your search return more "meaningfull" hits.
For instance, going to Alta Vista and feeding the monster the search word "computer" will not prove overly helpful. But most people still use such "big splat" search methods.
There are two ways to narrow your search:
There are many tips on narrowing your search and each engine will have its idiocyncrasies. But you have to learn that sexiest of all information retrieval talents: Boolean, named after George Boole, Boolean logic is just symbolic logic. For our Web Serachers purposes, it's just plus and minuses. For instance: You want to search "universities", But entering that as a one-word query deliver you 154,520 hits. Since most search engines show you 20 hits per screen, that means scrolling through a mind-numbering 7,726 screens. See you in a week or so.
But what you can do is to further weed out the useless links from those 154,520?
Think about what you want. Are you looking for every university in the world? No, you decide, you are only interested in ones in Ontario. Bingo! You have begun thinking in Boolean search terms. It's that simple. If you master nothing else, learing how to use three little words will change your Web life: AND, NO and OR.
"AND": Using this between two words means you will only get pages that, indeed, have both words on it. Seraching for "University AND Canada" should bring you in a slew of hits about Canadian universities.
"NO": The opposite: "University NO Canada" will give you any university except those with Canada on the page.
"OR": "University OR Canada" means the search engine will list Web pages that talk about universities or canada, all of them.
You now know about 300% more than the average Web Searcher. Take these tools, Netizens. May they serve you well.
However, one-word queries will rule the search engine world for a long time to come. Netters are not very versed in complex searches. If you are one of those people, and keep forgetting all the Boolean gizmos, explore Subject-Specific Search Engines. Bigger is not always better.
If you wanted something about movies, don't go to Lycos and do a word search on "movies". Go to MovieLink or Internet Movie Database mentioned above. Such specilaized databases mean you already have one level of filtering going on to help you.
Asking one of these movie engines about 2001 will return something more useful than asking Infoseek 2001 (Of course, you Boolean types would just type "2001 AND Kubrick" and narrow what Infoseek would deliver. Right?
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