Find Information: Searching the Web

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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 is understanding 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. Search results are usually 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. Next Page  Learn the Net (www.learnthenet.com) is Copyright 1996-2009. Michael Lerner Productions. All Rights Reserved.