Search Engines

Finding what you're looking for in the vast world of the World Wide Web

By Danny Green, Staff Writer, d.green7@genie.com

Hi folks. Here is my article for April. Hope you like it.

Have you ever wanted to find something on the web? If you have, I am sure you have had the same problem that everyone else has. The "net" is huge! There are several million web pages in existence. How do you find what you want? I am going to try to help with that problem this month by giving a brief introduction to five of the most popular "search engines": AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo. What is a search engine? To put it briefly, it is a program that searches a database containing information about many of the sites on the web.

There are many different options that you can use to search. You can enclose your keywords in quotes (Ex.: "amiga games") or use punctation (Ex: amiga;games ). It is also possible to use the wildcard "*" (asterisk) (Ex: amiga*). This is used just like the wild card that is used on DOS machines. It will find amiga, amigas, amiganoid, etc. Putting an asterisk in front and back (*mig*) will find lots of stuff with the letters "mig" in them. You can also use something we all drool over: Boolean operators! AND, NOT, and OR. I know you just love that feature and can't wait to go out and use it. Go ahead. I will still be here.

Back? Good! Another interesting feature is the ability to use the plus and minus sign. (Ex: +Amiga -IBM) Will find any article that has amiga in it, but does not contain the word IBM. Note that I have used capital letters here. This is important because it may cause the search to use an exact match. For example, amIga probably won't find anything. Any and all of these options can be used together to make very complex searches. Good luck.

Here is a quick run down of what options each one seems to use:

Which ones do I prefer? I use WebCrawler and Infoseek. Are they better? I don't know. They seem to match my style a little better than the others. My advice is to try them all and see which one you like. As always, for more information, get the docs. They are easy to retrieve.

That's it for this month. Enjoy.

  ______                       DannyG________////____
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 Daniel Green-Sales Rep. Weichert Realtors (908)687-4800