Searching the Web

Search Engines help navigating the millions of web sites

• Search engines designed by educational institutions and companies are used to organize information and allow users to search for specific keywords
• Generally return too much irrelevant info, so you need to use their advanced search capabilities. Every search engine has a link right at the top to search tips, and another one to their Advanced Search (or Power Search) page (may also be called More Search Options). Follow that link, avoid having to use complex syntax, and get better results!
• Links listed by search engines are frequently outdated. Search for new pages!
• Bookmark the advanced search pages of your favorite search engines!
• Use personal search assistants on your PC or Mac that search several engines at a time, such as Copernic 98 or WebFerret. These free, fast utilities can even store a search for you and re-do it regularly, so you receive updates on your search channels.

Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com)

• Considered one of the most popular search sites
• Web Page owners subscribe to the service and register their site under the proper category; Yahoo! experts check the site for relevance
• To search in Yahoo!, you must type in keywords for the site you're looking for
• You can narrow the search by having Yahoo! search only in specific categories that are listed on the search page (this is Yahoo!'s main distinction from other search sites)
• Yahoo!'s results are always displayed with the category preceding the link to the website, so you can quickly find other pages from the same category

Yahoo! Search Tips (valid for most search engines):

• Use Double Quotes Around Words that are Part of a Phrase
  This reduces the number of hits when you find too many irrelevant pages, but can cost you a lot of relevant hits as well! This technique works best when looking for a specific title, such as a book.
  

  example:  yields many sites about oil painters named Lorenzo, but finds only sites related to the movie.

  example:  yields only 5 sites, but yields 139 sites, all relevant!

  example:  yields lots of not-so-relevant sites ("school of nursing"), but does not improve the result, as "of" is a so-called stop-word, a word entirely disregarded by the search engines.

• Try various spellings
  This can help you find more results when your search was not productive enough (people might have different ideas how to spell something)

  example:  yields not only 193 sites, but also 6 relevant categories!

Sites vs. Pages:

Yahoo! first displays its categories, then websites listed in its own database (link: "web sites"). It also invokes the Inktomi search engine to find further matches on the web (this used to be done via AltaVista). These pages are called "web pages" and have not been checked by Yahoo! experts for their relevance. Inktomi searches for words within the title, body, and META-information of web pages. Unlike Yahoo!, Inktomi is not category-specific

• Widens the search
• However, it may list lots of sites that you won't need

Some more search parameter examples:

(see advanced search techniques for details on this)

• Chicago Bulls will search for sites about Chicago, Bulls, or Chicago Bulls
• "Chicago Bulls" will search for sites specifically with the phrase "Chicago Bulls"
• Chicago +Bulls will find Chicago sites only if they have a mention of Bulls in them
• Chicago -Bulls will find Chicago sites only if they do NOT have a mention of Bulls in them
• Chic* will look for sites containing any word that starts with "Chic"
• You can also narrow the search by combining words with the logical operators AND, OR, and NOT, as well as parentheses
• You can restrict the search to recent articles and list a certain number of matches per page
• Advanced help on searching yahoo!
• Yahoo! tutorials on web surfing and searching

Other search engines:

• Search UIC http://www.uic.edu/searchUIC.html for people, departments, pages
• Search.com ( www.search.com), from c|net (uses InfoSeek)
• AltaVista (www.altavista.com), now used on the Microsoft Network (msn)
• Lycos (www.lycos.com), with the LycosPro refinements: what's important to you?
• InfoSeek (www.infoseek.com)
• WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com)
• HotBot (www.hotbot.com), has the most powerful advanced search, easy to use!
• Excite (www.excite.com), the context-based search engine: offers More Like This
• Dejanews (www.dejanews.com) -- for searching USENET articles
• The Internet Sleuth (www.isleuth.com) a meta-index of 2,000 searchable databases
• Netscape has its own search engine as well. It is reachable via the Search button, which provides you with a randomly selected engine from a choice of six popular ones. Motto: try a new one today! You also find here links to sites for people search, such as WhoWhere? and Bigfoot, plus lots of other useful sites.
• Subject-specific search engines
  • run a search on your subject to find links to subject-specific search engines
• Foreign language search engines
  • in many countries, search engines specialized on their national sites are available
  • some of these are linked to by Opera Software's search page