Page 3--How To Plan The Best Search Strategy

How To Use Web Search Engines

How to get the most from *search engines like *AltaVista, *Infoseek, *Excite, *Webcrawler, *Lycos, HotBot, *Open Text and the *Yahoo Directory.

(starred links are Hyper-Live connections to our Zoom-Inform demo, which provides in-depth information about companies, products and technical terms)

Page 3--How To Plan The Best Search Strategy

The Web is potentially a terrific place to get information on almost any topic. Doing research without leaving your desk sounds like a great idea, but all too often you end up wasting precious time chasing down useless URLs. Almost everyone agrees that there's gotta be a better way! But for now we're stuck with making the best use of the search tools that already exist on the Web.

It's important to give some thought to your search strategy. Are you just beginning to amass knowledge on a fairly broad subject? Or do you have a specific objective in mind--like finding out everything you can about carpal tunnel syndrome, or the e-mail address of your old college roommate?

If you're more interested in broad, general information, the first place to go is to a Web Directory. If you're after narrow, specific information, a Web search engine is probably a better choice.

Searching by Means of Subject Directories

Think back to the library card catalogue analogy. In the old card files, and even in today's computer terminal library catalogues, you find information by searching on either the author, the title, or the subject. You usually choose the subject option when you want to cover a broad range of information.

Example: You'd like to create your own home page on the Web, but you don't know how to write HTML, you've never created a graphic file, and you're not sure how you'd post a page on the Web even if you knew how to write one. In short, you need a lot of information on a rather broad topic--Web publishing.

Your best bet is not a search engine, but a Web directory like Yahoo. Yahoo is a subject-tree style catalogue that organizes the Web into 14 major topics, including Arts, Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Social Science, Society and Culture. Under each of these topics is a list of subtopics, and under each of those is another list, and another, and so on, moving from the more general to the more specific.

Example: To find out about Web page publishing from Yahoo, select the Computers and Internet Topic, under which you find a subtopic on the Wide World Web. Click on that and you find another list of subtopics, several of which are pertinent to your search: Web Page Authoring, CGI Scripting, Java, HTML, Page Design, Tutorials. Selecting any of these subtopics eventually takes you to Web pages that have been posted precisely for the purpose of giving you the information you need.

If you are clear about the topic of your query, start with a Web directory rather than a search engine. Directories probably won't give you anywhere near as many references as a search engine will, but they are more likely to be on topic.

Web directories usually come equipped with their own keyword search engines that allow you to search through their indices for the information you need.

New and Important note: More and more search engines are incorporating Web directories into their sites. These directories interact with the main search engine on the site in various ways. See Excite, Infoseek and Lycos--they are no longer "just a search engine."

If you wish to cast a wider net that is usually provided by a Web directory, you will need to turn to one of the major Web search engines.

Searching by Means of Search Engines

This is where things start to get very complicated :)
Search engines are trickier than they look! You'll discover this the first time you enter a query on C++, the programming language. Most of the Web search engines will essentially say, "Huh?"

C++ is not a word. It's a letter followed by two characters that might, depending on the index, be regarded merely as punctuation. Few text search engines can handle input of this type. Many can't handle numbers, either. So much for "007," "R2D2,"or "Catch-22."

Here's another example of a text string search engines hate: "To be or not to be." Just about anyone who finished junior high school will be able to tell you where the phrase comes from and (possibly!) what it means. But most of the search engines choke because all the words in the phrase are stop words--i.e., unimportant words too short and too common to be considered relevant strings on which to search.

Let's take a less obvious example. Suppose you're a fan of murder mysteries and you want to search the Web for the home pages of all your favorite authors in that genre. If you simply enter the words "mystery" and "writer," most search engines will return hyperlinks to all Web documents that contain the word "mystery" or the word, "writer." This will probably include hundreds--or even thousands--of URLs, most of which will have no relevance to your search. If you enter the words as a phrase, however, you stand a somewhat better chance of getting some good hits.

If you understand how search engines organize information and run queries, you can maximize your chances of getting hits on URLs that matter.

Next: Find out How Search Engines Work