Search Engines
It is worth spending time learning to search the Net. Being such a marvellous source of information, many people use it as a research tool.
To search the Net you need to use a directory system called a Search Engine. If you don’t know how to use a Search Engine properly you will experience heaps of frustration as you are offered hundreds of thousands of sites to look through.
Here’s the basic procedure for searching using search engines. Click here to learn about using Meta Search Engines - a real timesaver!
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Think about what you are looking for and try and define some keywords, several if possible.
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Enter the keywords into the Search box on the Search Engine page and press Enter or the Search button.
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After a moment the results of your search will be displayed for you in order of relevance to your keywords.
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You can then look through the results and see short descriptions of the sites
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Choose one which looks appropriate and click on it – your browser will jump you to that site
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If it’s not what you want, you can either click “Back,” to return to your results on the Search Engine page, or find a Link and keep on going!
See the chapter in my book called "Seven Secrets of Successful Searching" for more detailed tips on wording your search queries.
There are several search engines to choose from - they all differ slightly in the way they work, so it is my advice to choose one or two search engines and to learn to use them well.
Here is a list of the top ten search engines and where to find them. They have the most websites in their databases and show the most relevancy. Relevancy refers to the percentage of sites that were useful to you in relation to the number of sites returned. Have you ever looked up a word and been returned sites that had nothing to do with what you expected? Those searches produced a low relevancy.
AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/
Excite http://www.excite.com
Galaxy http://www.einet.net
HotBot http://hotbot.lycos.com/
InfoSeek http://www.go.com/
Lycos http://www.lycos.com
Open Text http://www.opentext.net
WebCrawler http://www.webcrawler.com
Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com
Yahoo! differs from the others in that it returns you results by category as well as by site. The category results of your search are displayed first. Then Yahoo! puts a line across the page and lists the individual site result. You can click on the category to further your search or just choose the site. The other Search Engines listed here only give you site results, not categories.
Clicking on the Search button on your browser, displays a search service in the left side of your screen and a webpage on the right. If you try a different search engine, bookmark it as a favorite. Next time you want to use it you can easily get to it again. You might even like to make a directory in your Favorites folder called Search Engines and have several of them listed in there. See the previous section on Favorite pages if you’re not sure how to use and organize your Favorites.
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