Download Internet Power Searching: Finding Pearls in a Zillion Grains

Internet Power Searching:
Finding Pearls in a Zillion
Grains of Sand
By Daniel Arze
Growth
During the past two years Web
content has expanded enormously.
Internet explosion caused.
Access to vast amount of information
from many different sources not
available in the past.
Search Engine
The major research tool.
Over 380 million pages.(1998)
Hundred of databases.
Downside
Many hours can be wasted searching with out
results.
Documents no longer exist.
Most Engines cannot index frames or image
maps.
Engines do no index information from
complex databases like Amazon.com
Sites requiring passwords are not returned.
Large portion of the web not searchable.
Major Engines
AltaVista (1995)
HotBot (1997)
Excite
Northern Light
Yahoo (Oldest Web directory)
Alta Vista
Good for specific searches.
Offers advanced query feature.
Allows natural language query.
Provides translation between English and five
different languages.
Boolean searching.
Filed searching.
Not user-friendly.
Excite
Good for broad topics.
Simultaneous search.
NewsTracker (300 news sources).
User-friendly travel site.
Boolean search.
HotBot
User-friendly interface.
Results appear quickly.
Can review 100 results at the time.
Optional boolean searching.
Search by continents.
Field searching.
Northern Light
Web and Northern Light collections
(available for $1.00-$4.00 each).
Advanced power and industry searches.
Automatically refines searches.
Enterprise accounts (corporations and
Organizations).
Yahoo!
Good for broad topics.
Contains 750,000 sites.
World Yahoo! (Country versions).
Inclusion/exclusion.
Phrases.
Wildcards, Title, URL limiters.
DejaNews and Reference.com
Newsgroups.
Mailing lists.
Identifying experts.
Where to start
Depends on research goals and needs.
Become familiar with major search
engines.
Plan your search (unique words,
phrases, and synonyms).
Don’t spend too much time on one
engine move to the next one.
Hint & Tips
Boolean searching.
Quotations around Phrases.
Field searching (Date, title, URL, sound,
video, etc.)
Words such as Internet, Web, as, the, a,
etc. are excluded.
Metasearch Engines
Websites that search in several
engines at once.

DogPile




(Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, GoTo, Planetsearch, Thunderstone,
WebCrawler, Infoseek)
Reference.com, Dejanews, AltaVista.
Two dozen online news services.
Internet Sleuth



3,000 strong collections of specialized online databases.
Linked to popular Net search engines.
Sorts results.
Metasearch Engines con’t
ProFussion
Lets you select what engines to use.
 Filters results to remove duplicate and
broken links.

Intelligent Agents
Outcome might be incomplete
Intelligent Software programs (BullsEye)





Analyze
Filter
Delete Duplicates
Select by number of hits.
Track & update searches hourly, daily, weekly, and
e-mail updates.
Hard to find Information
Information from government agencies &
professional and trade associations.

Direct Search


Links to resources not easily searchable on the web
Library catalogs, books, news, sources and ready reference
Conclusion
Search engines are still the best way and
source to find information on the Web.
It’s easy to use and easy to access.
There is still room to incorporate all the
Web-pages that are still not accessible
through the Search Engines.