--The Web Search Wizard

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 5--The Web-Search Wizard

Ready to apply all that info about querying, indexing, search refining and relevancy ranking? Good! This page should help you search more effectively even if you didn't read everything else on this site.

The Key to Successful Searching: Remember, you are smarter than a computer. Use your intelligence. Search engines are fast, but dumb.

A search engine's ability to understand what you want is very limited. It will obediently look for occurrences of your keywords all over the Web, but it doesn't understand what your keywords mean or why they're important to you. To a search engine, a keyword is just a string of characters. It doesn't know the difference between cancer the crab and cancer the disease...and it doesn't care.

But you know what you query means (at least, we hope you do!). Therefore, you must supply the brains. The search engine will supply the raw computing power.

The principles of Smart Searching:

1. Know Where To Look First

Are you looking for information about a person? A company? A software product? A health-related problem? Do you want to find a job? Get a date? Plan a vacation? Do you need to research a term paper? Document a news story? Size up your company's competition?

There are various databases containing specific information that might be more useful to you than a general search engine. Check out Spidap's list of Other Ways To Find Things On The Internet.

2. Fine-tune your keywords

If you're searching on a noun (the name of a person, place or thing), remember that most nouns are subsets of other nouns. Enter the smallest possible subset that describes what you want. Be specific. Try to meet the search engine halfway by refining your search before you begin.

Example: If you want to buy a car, don't enter the keyword "car" if you can enter the keyword "Toyota." Better still, enter the phrase "Toyota Dealerships" AND the name of the city where you live.

3. Be Refined

Read the help files and take advantage of the available search refining options. Use phrases, if possible. Use the Boolean AND (or the character +) to include other keywords that you would expect to find in relevant documents.

Also learn to EXCLUDE with the Boolean NOT. Excluding is particularly important as the Web grows and more documents are posted. Run your initial query over again several times, each time adding further refinements to narrow down your list of relevant hits.

Example: If you want to find out how medical details about your grandmother's diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease, try entering "Alzheimers" AND "symptoms" AND "prognosis." If you want to find out about Alzheimers care and community resources, query on "Alzheimers" AND "support groups" AND "resources" AND NOT "symptoms."

4. Query by example

Take advantage of the option that many search engine sites are now offering: you can "query by example," or "find similar sites," to the ones that come up on your initial hit list. Essentially what you're doing is telling the search engine, "yes, this looks promising, give me more like this one."

Try it! Use some of our favorite search engines to do some searches right from our page:

AltaVista: Help for Simple Query

AltaVista: Help for Advanced Query

Excite's Advanced Query Language Help

Yahoo! Help

Other Ways To Find Things On The Internet

If you know what exactly you're looking for, try searching some of the following specialized Internet databases:

Newsgroups (special interest discussions on every imaginable topic)

Deja News Research Service (excellent searchable databases of Usenet posts)
Alta Vista (select "Usenet" instead of "Web", then run your query)

People (Many users are looking for other people on the Web--old friends, old lovers, business colleagues, networking contacts, support groups, new friends. Here are some places to start)

InterNIC's Web Interface to Whois (search internet domain names to see if they're already in use, and the details of who is using them)
Roadmap (give it an address, it'll give you a map)
Internet Address Finder (large database of email addresses, gleaned from Usenet, various public sources, and people's own submissions)
Switchboard (national White Pages databases)
Yahoo! People Search (good listings, although some are out-of-date)
WhoWhere? PeopleSearch (limited listings--dependent on people submitting their names)
***Alta Vista (this is one of the best ways to find someone if he/she has ever posted something on the Internet, or been referred to in an Internet document. Try variations on the name, i.e., Bill Clinton, Clinton, Bill billclinton, William Clinton, President Clinton).
The new HotBot (formerly Inktomi) search engine allows you to search by person (select "the person" from the pulldown box).

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