The Computer Teacher

The World Wide Web commonly called the Web is enormous. Finding information on the Web will test the patience of most; however, here are a few tips.

There are numerous "search engines" available on the Web that index or categorize documents. The indexer reads documents (Web pages) and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Searching for the right information can be done either by "keywords" like "gray fox" or by "browsing" a directory that has categorized gray fox under Science, Animals. In a keyword search the resulting list of documents will be ranked by relevance. Although this ranking process varies from engine to engine, generally documents containing all the keywords will be listed first.

Search Tips

Enter the singular form of a word rather than plural, e.g., dog instead of dogs.
When entering more than one word, most search engines will look for all documents containing each word. As example for "gray fox," the search results will return all documents containing both the words gray and fox AND documents containing either gray or fox. You can narrow your search by using quote marks around "gray fox." This will tell the search engine to look for documents with both words in that exact order-"gray" immediately followed by "fox" (gray fox).
Refine your search by adding another descriptive word such as gray fox animal.
Many search engines will let you put the + and - symbols in front of keywords to tell the engine which words must (+) or must not (-) appear in the search results list. E.g., +gray +fox -fishing. This will tell the search engine to look for "gray" followed by "fox" and not "fishing."
All search engines are not created equal! The search engine is only as effective as the amount of Web pages it has indexed. When you don't find your answer in one search engine, try another search engine.

Search Engine Roundup

Google (www.google.com) is one of the most popular search engines due to its sleek, uncomplicated search page and the number of Web pages that have been indexed.
Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) was begun by 2 students as a hobby in 1994 and evolved into a complex directory listing Website throughout the world. The name Yahoo is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." For those wishing to "browse" by category, Yahoo is the place to go.
AlltheWeb (www.alltheweb.com) was started date of 1999. AlltheWeb is a keyword search engine with an interesting advanced search feature that allows a number of filters such as finding documents that must contain audio (sound) files.
AltaVista (www.altavista.com), which means "a view from above", was created in 1995 at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA and is now owned by Overture Services, Inc. AltaVista provides a sophisticated search engine with many advanced searching features.
Windows Live (http://www.live.com/) Live Search is a Microsoft product that is in competitition with Google and delivers much the same content such as links to images, maps, news, video, etc.
AskJeeves (www.askjeeves.com) is known as a natural language search engine. This means you can enter a question such as "Who was the first president?"

This is a limited list of the top search engines available on the Web. For those wishing to learn more about search engines, directories, and databases dedicated to almost any topic check out the Search Engine Guide at www.searchengineguide.com.