Searching the Web

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 are after some specific information.  Where do you start? Searching the Internet requires part skill, part luck and a little bit of art. Thank goodness, a number of free online resources help with the hunt.

You've probably heard of Yahoo!, Google, and AltaVista.  There are 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 categories -- directories and indexes . Directories, such as Yahoo! , are good at identifying general information.  Like a card catalog in a library, they classify websites into similar 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 the Louvre museum website, use a directory. 

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 millions of web pages and newsgroup postings and indexing all of the words.

Indexes like AltaVista and Google find 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 may be 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.