The Web Tutorials

Search Engines A search engine is a giant database containing the URLs of most of the web sites. It contains a short description of those sites, and provides you with clickable URLs, so you can go directly to the site the search engine has found for you. There are several hundred search engines, but there are a dozen or so you are likely to find more useful than any of the others unless you have a very specialised need. The main databases are as follows: www.yahoo.com www.slider.com Global Online Directory (GOD) LookSmart UKPlus www.lycos.com www.infoseek.com www.webcrawler.com www.excite.com www.altavista.com www.yahoo.co.uk SearchUK Magellan UK Plus Multimeta HotBot Dogpile Northern Light EuroSeek Planet Search MetaCrawler MetaFind Do note that some search engines have a country bias. The .com engines will be USA biased simply because half the web sites in the world are North American. If you want to look up restaurants you will probably be interested in going somewhere to eat this evening. If you are living in the UK you won't want to know about eating houses in Columbus, Ohio, so you would choose to search a .co.uk search engine in this instance. I had only just written the above when the following item dropped into my email folder from The Cobb Group's Power Searching with Alta Vista newsletter: "The Internet isn't limited by international borders, but it is limited by time zones. The Internet in the U.S. is busiest in the afternoon between 3:00 and 5:00 eastern standard time and in the evening between about 7:00 and 11:00. If you access the AltaVista index during these time periods, you may find response time sluggish. Taking advantage of hours when Internet traffic is low (for example, in the morning) can help insure that you get speedy responses to your search queries. But there is a way to effectively access AltaVista during off hours, even during the middle of the afternoon when Internet traffic peaks. AltaVista provides five mirror sites (additional AltaVista Web sites containing the same information as the main site that help ease traffic to the main site) around the world that you can use for your searches. These mirror sites allow you to take advantage of low traffic times in other regions of the globe. For example, if you're trying to conduct a search at 3:00 in the afternoon, you could use AltaVista's main Web site at http://www.altavista.digital.com but you might actually have better luck using the Australian mirror site where it's 5:00 a.m. and where there's probably very little or no local traffic. Here's a list of AltaVista's five mirror sites:" Asia Australia Latin America Northern Europe Southern Europe http://altavista.skali.com.my http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/cgi-bin/telstra/ http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/ http://www.altavista.telia.com/ http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/ A mirror site is a copy of the original site, but running at a different location. There is no need if you are in the UK to get a slow connection all the way to a clogged up site in the States, when you could probably connect quicker to a site in Europe. Keep a list of those mirror sites. And do remember to think globally, especially with regard to the different time zones, and the likelihood of encountering foreign rush-hour traffic. Using a search engine is simplicity itself. You enter the URL in your browser's Location Bar and you will be presented with a search screen. You have several options, the simplest is to enter some keywords into a text field and then click on the SEARCH button. The program will then search its database, bringing you back a page or ten of URLs which supposedly match your criteria. The secret is to know how to enter useful keywords. To type in the word "art" for instance will bring up the first few pages of about 500,000 references. The word is far too general to be a useful keyword. Even if you keyed in the word "painting" you might get a strange set of pages displayed. Do remember that words generally have more than one meaning. If you are interested in Art and in particular the art of painting, typing in "painting" will probably bring up some (no doubt, too many again) URLs that will be useful. It will also bring up URLs to shops that sell paint, and also books that colleges use to teach people painting and decorating. It is important that you sit down and analyse your keywords before going online and keying them in. You can waste an enormous amount of time trying to find something, and get absolutely nowhere because you haven't thought out your strategy. So you are interested in some paintings. Which paintings? If we narrow it down to impressionist, perhaps Monet, and maybe you are not interested in the pointillists, but you do know there are some pictures in the impressionist style in the Tate Gallery that you really like. You are now in a position to give the search engine some useful keywords. Forget art, forget painting on its own. You could type in "impressionist painters". With the words inside speach marks. Some of the search engines will find instances of those two words together. Other engines will strip out the quotes and look for separate words. For the moment let us forget the differences among the engines and concentrate on their similarities. Try and get a selection of keywords that define what you are seeking from different angles. Where they converge should produce the pages you want to see. You would type in something like the following: Monet , "Tate Gallery", "impressionist painters", impressionism, Then click on the SEARCH button. With any luck you will get back a useful selection of URLs. If you don't then you should read the instructions on the site. You will be given hints on how to enter keywords, and how to refine your searches. It is probably a good idea to copy the relevant pages onto your hard disk and then go offline, check out the pages while offline, and then go back to the site, and have another go. Before we go any further, let us have a brief look at the technical side.

Search Criteria You should know the basic coding behind the workings of the search engines. If you decide to create a commercial site you will need the services of your friendly neighbourhood search engines. They are your electric light. They are the pavement running past your shop window. In the physical world a shop window fronts a busy pavement. People walk up and down, look in the window, and see things that appeal to them. They come in and do business with you. Ultimately, money goes from customer to vendor, and vendor's bank balance swells, and all is sweetness and light. If you have a shop in the wilderness where one goat and six frogs pass by if there isn't a frost, then no-one is going to see the goods through your shop window, and no-one will enter and give you money. In short, you need traffic past your shop. You need people to see you. This is just as true when your shop is a virtual one. The only way people are going to see you is if you get write-ups in magazines and newspapers, or if friends pass on the URL, or if those people needing your services use a search engine to find suitable sites. If you aren't there in the search engine's database, it is as if the lights are out in your shop, and no pavement runs past your shop window. You may have everything that people want on your pages, but no-one knows what's there. So no-one visits your site, and you go broke. You need to be on those search engines. You need to think carefully about what you put in your coding to get into those engines, but we will deal with this in some detail later in the work. You also need to think carefully about what you put in the search bar when seeking a site. A few general rules are as follows: Don't use general words, try and be as specific as possible. Always enter the most specific of your keywords first, and the most general last. Be careful about the words you do choose as they could be part of other words. To use an example from the computer world: Mac is part of the word mace, mach, macintosh, and many other words. If you are going to use the word Mac, you would need to ask the search engine to find other words that go with it. Check out the search engine's Help files first. Try to fine tune your search by using several keywords. Be careful with your spelling. Check it before hitting the Search button. Be very careful how you use wildcards such as the asterisk (*). See below. You can use boolean operators: "and" "or" and "not", together with "adj". This latter term stands for 'adjacent'. In other words it will only pick out the documents which contain the words you specify if they are close together in that document. Remember that these operators don't always work as you expect them to. Do be logical when choosing your use of these operators. A typical search might be as follows: bagpipes AND Northumberland NOT Scottish This will bring up a list of pages devoted to the Northumberland pipes and not those that deal with the Scottish bagpipes. camels OR zebras will generate far more results than either of the following options camels AND zebras camels NOT zebras Do remember that "camels AND zebras" will only find pages that contain both. There are bound to be less of those than pages containing either one or the other.

Sometimes when you try to link to a Web page from search results you get a 404 or Not Found error message. This error message implies that the document no longer exists, but that isn't always the case. Maybe the file you want has moved to a different place on the web site. May it has been renamed. Try backtracking down the url. For instance; I may have my file on searching at: http://www.runway.co.uk/tutorials/training/internet/search.html However, I may have reorganised my site since last updating my listing with the search engines. I may have cut down on my sub-directories. The page could now be at: http://www.runway.co.uk/internet/search.html If you can't find the file at the first url, try the basic address of the home page, and use the index there: http://www.runway.co.uk/ Stop Words Stop words are words that a search engine ignores because they create false hits (irrelevant search results) when included in a search query. Common stop words include: a, the, in, up, if, an, at, out, and to. In addition, the search engine ignores symbols and puctuation such as @, #, $, %, >, &, !, ', :). Stop words also include the following terms: business, program, copyright, research, data, services, information, software, Internet, support, name, system, number, university, people, www Thus searching for a phrase "To be or not to be" includes only stop words and will result in a No documents match in AltaVista Search's Simple Search, and in more than 65 million hits in the Advanced Search. However, if you put quotation marks around the phrase, you'll get much closer to the results you want. The search engine will then search for the phrase as a single item instead of as individual words. Make sure you type Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR) in uppercase letters so AltaVista Search can recognize them. About five percent of searches submitted to AltaVista Search include these Boolean operators in lowercase letters, which makes them stop words instead of operators. Truncation Professional searchers, such as librarians, have long known about a search strategy called stemming or truncation. This strategy allows you to conduct a search that includes the stems of words. The wildcard in AltaVista Search is the asterisk (*), which operates as a placeholder for missing letters. When you use the wildcard, it opens a keyword to include variations on the word, for example: wood* includes wood, woodchuck, wooden, woodland, woodshed, woodwork, woodstock, woodwind, and so on. You'll need to remember two rules when using the AltaVista Search wildcard: * The wildcard must appear after at least three characters of the keyword; for example: Net*. * The wildcard can act as a placeholder only for up to five unknown lowercase characters. In the example above, wood* would also search for woodwork, but not woodworking. For the latter you would have to search for wood**. You can use the AltaVista Search wildcard to broaden a search for spelling variations. For instance, the query colo*r will retrieve documents with the American spelling (color) as well as the British spelling (colour). You can also use a wildcard to help in a search for file types that have various file extensions. For example, sound files include the extensions au, wav, mid, and midi, just to name a few. In a normal search, you'd have to search for each file type separately, but with a wildcard, you can search for all these sound file types at the same time. To format this type of search, just include the filename, a period, and then a wildcard (for instance, Yesterday.*).

Second-tier searches You can accelerate document research by using your browser's Find function to search for words or phrases in the text of a document. To search for a word or phrase, (if you're working in Windows) just press Ctrl-F (for Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer). Your browser will display a Find dialog box. Just enter the keywords or phrase you want to locate in the Find What text box. Use the Find Next button to initiate the search and to continue the search throughout the document. TracerLock If you need to make the same search over and over in order to keep track of a subject there's a Web robot called TrackerLock that can help. This robot actually sends search queries to the AltaVista search engine. To set up a search, first go to the TracerLock Web site and establish an account. Then enter your search on your TracerLock User Profile Page. TrackerLock lets you enter up to five search queries for both Web based and USENET AltaVista searches. You can use AND, OR, and NOT Boolean operators, quotes for searching by phrase, case sensitivity, and other AltaVista search features. As I mentioned earlier, I subscribe to a newsletter which gives me search tips. Further information can be found on their web site. A couple of urls should come in handy: http://www.cobb.com/isa/s_isa http://www.zdjournals.com/isa

Basic Search Information If your search results are regularly problematic, take the time to read the search engine's help page. Make sure you're using check boxes, dropdown lists, and other search options correctly. For example, if you don't specify a specific language like English in AltaVista's language dropdown box you can get hits for Web pages in 25 different languages including Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swedish. Another example of this type of problem is a dropdown list which determines which database the engine searches. There are various places to go to find information on how to search. Try the url below, and check out the articles here. http://www.cobb.com/isa/basic/ The ZDNet web site has put together a series of articles intended to help users search the Net more efficiently. To see the list of articles, go to: http://www.zdnet.com/products/searchuser.html Useful articles on searching the internet. In this article we explain how you can find thousands of databases (that aren't indexed by the major search engines) with a Web site called Internets. Sometimes searching small directories by geographical region leads to faster and better information. In this article, we examine some search strategies for searching the Internet by city, state, country, and region.   Message forums This is the place to go to ask your search questions, or to participate in discussions with others in our Message Forums. In addition, from time to time, the editors of Internet Search Advantage will sponsor special message threads on specific search topics. And check out: http://www.cobb.com/isa/message.htm http://www.cobb.com/isa/s_isa/983   Useful Search Software Internet FastFind lets you enter search criteria that it then simultaneously runs through all the leading search engines. When the utility is finished, it removes duplicate listings and presents clearly organized search results. There is an article on this software.   Dealing with Error messages An article detailing some of the most common Internet error messages and providing practical solutions that will help prevent you from getting them.   Limiting searches The key to any good search query is to construct it in such a way as to limit search results to only the subject you're interested in. There is an article to show you how to use the Boolean NOT operator to keep unwanted hits out of your search results. http://www.zdjournals.com/isa/s_isa/989/isa9891.htm

Directories There are directories and indexes. Directories are put together by teams of people who fit site entries into a pre-defined list of categories, and in some cases, write a brief description or provide a quality rating for the entry. Directories are far from comprehensive, but they contain quality entries. Indexes are automated, and aim to be comprehensive, so expect a great many more results, although whether they are all of a high quality is another matter. Magellan This a smaller but quality directory. Sites are rated, reviewed and allocated among 15 main topics, each of which divides into various sub-topics. It also provides search links to Excite. UK Plus This is a UK based directory operated in conjunction with Infoseek. Every entry is checked and rated by human beings and classified within 18 top-level categories. It provides good descriptions of all the sites it lists. However it is not as large and comprehensive as some of the others. Yahoo With a directory like Yahoo you can also do your searching in a slightly different way. You can dig down through the categories listed on the search engine. If you were searching for a particular way to cook mongolian camel you could use the search box and enter "camel AND recipe". But you could also go to the Food and Drink section of the index, and start to dig down through the layers until you reach an area that deals with the particular kind of food you are looking for. Do remember there are usually extensive Help files to be found on all the Search Engine sites. Submissions To submit your pages to Yahoo you must write a short summary which an editor will review

Indexes InfoSeek Infoseek is one of the few search engines that can index text inside Frames. You enter keywords in the search box and then hit the Search button. InfoSeek assumes there is an AND between each of your keywords. Capitalisation is important, so only capitalize words you want to be recognized as proper nouns. You should also try various forms of your keywords, including plurals, adjectives, and adverbs. Also try synonyms. Alongside its results it displays a sidebar containing suggested keywords for related topics. You can also search your current results to refine your criteria. If you want both upper- and lower-case occurrences of a term, use only the lowercase word in the search box. You can use a comma to separate phrases from each other. Quotation marks can also be used to identify a phrase, thus keeping the individual words together. You can use a plus sign (+) to distinguish terms that should appear in every document. The + appears at the beginning of the term, with no space before the first letter of the first word; e.g., +Alpine meadows, France. You can use a minus sign (-) to signify words or phrases nor to be included in any document. Lycos You have an options menu which allows you to refine your search criteria. For instance, you may not know how to spell a word. If it is someone's name, you won't be able to look it up in a dictionary, so type in various versions of the name. It can also index text inside Frames. You can choose how tightly Lycos interprets your keywords. If you are just 'fishing' tell Lycos to interpret your terms loosely. When you get closer to what you want, ask for a strong match. This is an option that needs some care. You need to try it out to see how it works. AltaVista AltaVista provides a useful button labelled Refine. This displays a list of related keywords that you can include or exclude to improve the results. This is something you need to test out to see the way the method improves your results. Excite Excite is fast, and allows you to limit your search to UK or European sites. It also has an interesting approach in that it has a link called "More Like This" that appears by each result. This uses concept-linking to generate an automatic search on related keywords. This can lead to very erratic, but sometimes useful results. Excite also provides "Channels", which are directory topics you can use to find sites on a particular theme. It can also index text inside Frames. HotBot HotBot claims to be the biggest of the automated indexes. It is very fast and will often produce references not picked up by other search engines. Meta searches You can search through a number of search engines at the same time using meta-engines. Below are three such searchers. Dogpile Queries are sent off to 25 different search engines, including directories and Usenet engines, in batches of three. The first 10 results from each engine are then displayed with links that let you pursue more from that particular engine, or move on to the next batch of three. It's not exactly sophisticated but it's undoubtedly thorough. MetaCrawler Queries half a dozen search engines all at once and then collates the results, which includes deleting duplicates. MetaFind A narrower, more structured alternative to Dogpile. It queries six search engines, combines the results and removes duplicates. Further links are as follows: http://www.iTools.com/research-it/research-it.html is a great link station for searching dictionary, thesaurus, language translation, and other reference databases. But true meta search engines, like the ones shown below query multiple search engines simultaneously from one search query and then return the results organized by search engine or combined into one set of returns. Meta search engines can give you more complete search results, but there's a cost. Meta search engines tend to be slow precisely because they query more than one search engine at a time. Conducting a search with a meta search engine can take a minute or more, as opposed to the 5 or 10 seconds it takes using other search tools. And meta search engines won't let you specify search parameters for individual search engines (most meta search engines allow only simple Boolean operators), so you'll have more results to sift through. SavvySearch The Internet Sleuth Dogpile MetaCrawler Highway 61 SuperSeek Personal Compass Inference Fine Mother Load DigiSearch ProFusion Mamma

Newsgroups Newsgroups are also a major source of information. The easiest way to get information on what groups are out there, and where they can be found, and what they actually contain is by going to DejaNews. This search facility also has copious Help files to show you round the Newsgroup world. They are comprehensive and I see no reason to duplicate them here. Specialist Search Engines Cars and things Directory of directories Job search Food and Cooking Football Media directory News Rock and Roll Webmasters Reference Library Translations The Internet is a world wide network, which means you will occasionally turn up search results in foreign languages. AltaVista has a free translation service, that will translate from English to French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German, and vice versa. The limit on how much text it will translate is variable right now, depending on traffic, but should normally be in the range of 20 KB. You can go straight to the translation page at: http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate There you can enter a URL or type or cut and paste into the box any text you want translated. That means you can translate email messages, newsgroup items, text that you have on your hard drive, or the balance of Web pages that were too long to translate in a single gulp. Unless the text is idiomatic or laden with slang, you're likely to get remarkably good translations. The translation service is especially good for business communications. Of course, words that are embedded in graphics remain untranslated--only plain text is translated. Alexa Searching the Internet for vacation packages, statistics, gifts, and other products and services can be a hassle if you don't have the correct tools. Where to go to find quality products and information and how to know that the source or vendor is reliable can absorb abundant amounts of your valuable time and energy. So, close your browser window on those rusty old search engines right now, and go to http://www.alexa.com/download/free/index.html. It will change the way you surf the Internet forever. Alexa is the free Web navigation service that is helping thousands of Web users to surf the Web smarter, faster and easier. Alexa's statistical and factual web site data appears in the desktop utility to assist users in determining the value of web sites as they surf the Web. With Alexa's drill-down feature, you can make a web site more accountable by gathering information such as: a web site's popularity rating level of traffic and ways that surfers get to the web site TRUSTe endorsements which measure that company's online information policy institutional information publicly available financial and organizational information other web site statistics Alexa will even suggest a list of the most popular links from a given web site based on the navigation behaviors of the entire Web population. Alexa also solves the problem of '404-not found' errors by providing you with an archived copy of any publicly available web site on request. In this way, Alexa ensures that once information appears on the Web, it cannot be lost. Not enough? Alexa has also added the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to its navigation tools to provide you with a fully integrated desktop reference wherever you go. This unique service is available free, and runs in conjunction with Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer as a toolbar application. So, download today and always know where you are and where to go next on the Web. "Alexa welcomes you to a higher level of intelligent navigation for the Web." At least, that's what the blurb says. Try it and see. http://www.alexa.com/download/free/index.html

Specialist Search Engines Plain language searches from Ask Jeeves Search for experts at Expert Search FAQs The Infinite Ink Web site maintains a great resource that provides tips on finding and writing FAQs. You can also find FAQ files with a simple query to a search engine. To search for a FAQ, just enter the keyword(s) for the subject you want to search, and then include the keyword "FAQ" in your search query. Several major universities maintain lists of USENET FAQs. MIT's FAQ site links to nearly all the FAQs for newsgroups. These Newsgroup FAQs are listed alphabetically, so you can quickly scroll down to the group you want and access its FAQ. Ohio State University maintains a similar site. FAQ Finder The site provides access to more than 1,800 FAQ files organized in 28 subject categories. The FAQ Finder links to FAQs on literature, foreign countries, education, movies, music, and technology. You'll find links to FAQs on Shakespeare, colleges, food science, MUDs, historical costuming, income tax, cryptology, and more. In addition, FAQ Finder is a great resource on computer information, with links to more than 300 FAQs covering computers, the Internet, programming, and software. Encyclopedia Brit Encyclopedia Britannica has entered into the search business with its new site, the Britannica Internet Guide. The Guide "classifies, rates, and reviews more than 65,000 Web sites. Britannica editors search the Web to identify quality Web resources, which are clearly and concisely described, rated according to consistent standards, and indexed for superior retrieval." Education Education World is a database of 110,000-plus educational sites available on the Internet. The site features a search engine that lets you search the database with keywords or use advanced search options with seven specially designed criteria to help limit your searches. You can also jump to special featured topic subjects like regional resources, K12 and universities online, event calendars, mailing lists, and more. But Education World doesn't stop there, it also provides a subject category list that's organized like Yahoo! in 20 different subject categories. In addition, you'll find articles on lesson planning, news, curriculum, books, administration, and educational sites. Research-It! This web site is a great link station for searching dictionary, thesaurus, language translation, and other reference databases.   Bigbook This free yellow pages directory combines a comprehensive U.S. business database with nationwide, street-level maps to create a simple, graphical method of finding basic contact information and the location of more than 11 million businesses in the United States. You can search BigBook by business name, category, city or state.   USA Government The GovBot Web site is an index of more than 840,000 U.S. government and military Web sites.   Library of Congress The Library of Congress collection consists of more than 110,000,000 items in 470 languages and all formats including maps, atlases, charts, computer files, films, graphic arts, manuscripts, microforms, music, periodicals, photographs, prints, sound recordings, and videos, as well as about 20 million books.

Discussion Groups Reference.com is a gateway to more than 150,000 discussion groups. This index includes more than 15,000 newsgroups, 100,000 mailing lists, and 25,000 Web forums on the Internet. Reference.com also provides quick methods for searching and browsing its index. Usenet and Listserv Tile.net is a web site designed to make listservs and USENET newsgroups easy to find. You can search Tile.net listservs by description, name, popularity, subject, sponsoring organization, or host country. USENET newsgroups are organized by index, description, and newsgroup hierarchy. Tile.net also provides information about FTP sites and computer product vendors. Newsgroup FAQs The MIT Newsgroup FAQs web site has a great resource if you're looking for the FAQ of a specific newsgroup. It's an FTP file site that links you to nearly all the FAQs for newsgroups. Newsgroups on the site are listed alphabetically, so you can quickly scroll down to the group you want and access its FAQ. Educational sites Education World is a database of 50,000-plus educational sites available on the Internet. The site features a search engine that lets you search by educational topic, regional resources, and universities online, event calendars, and more. In addition, you'll find articles on lesson planning, news, curriculum, books, administration, and educational sites. The ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) Web site is a federally funded information system that consists of 16 subject-specific clearinghouses and a variety of services. The site features a virtual library, access to a research and development team, and a database of more than 80,000 article abstracts covering educational research and practice. The CCSO Phonebook Server is a directory of 330-plus universities and organizations around the world. The CCSO serves as a gateway to phone directories, so you can search for contact information at institutions like Boston University, Ecole Centrale in France, and Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia. FTP files Searching for FTP files on the Internet can be difficult. However, several Internet services index prominent FTP sites or provide extensive software reviews and download links. The largest of these sites is the Filez FTP index, which scans more than 5,000 FTP servers and indexes 75 million files. You can limit your searches by a variety of operating systems: Macintosh, Windows 3.x, 95,and NT, DOS, OS/2, Acorn, Amiga, Atari, Newton, and Unix. You can also limit file searches to subjects like Perl, game, cursors, fonts, graphics, icons, midi, movies, sounds, Real Audio, karioke, and wav. The Filez index is also catalogued (like Yahoo!) to provide even more search options. Other good services for searching and accessing FTP files include: FilePile The Archie servers Snoopie SHAREWARE.COM ZDNet Software Library

OneLook Dictionaries The OneLook Dictionaries site accesses dictionaries on business, computers, the Internet, medicine, science, and technological, as well as religion, acronym, slang, and pronunciation dictionaries. You can search all the dictionaries that the site accesses, or query the engine for general, pronunciation or spelling words. The site includes a link station so you can connect directly to any of the 255 dictionaries. Ecola Newsstand The site links to more than 6,100 online news publications and is well organized for quick, easy access. The site also includes links to hundreds of online magazines organized by subject. It also has links to 17 organizations that specialize in breaking news, like the Associated Press and Reuters wire services, and broadcast organizations like ABC, CNN, CBS, and NPR. Whois? InterNIC's Whois service provides a way of finding e-mail addresses, postal addresses and telephone numbers of those who have registered "objects" with the InterNIC. Using Whois, you can also determine whether a domain name you desire is already in use; you can learn who administers a particular site; and you can view a list of a site's name servers. To search for contact information just enter the Web site domain name, but leave out www. For example to find the Web Host or ISP for the web site http://www.runway.co.uk enter the query runway.co.uk. InterNIC will display information about the domain, including postal address, administrative contact's (the Webmaster) phone number and email address. AltaVista's new search technology called RealName - provides a web address based on familiar words rather than complicated URLs. The search technology is designed for new Internet users who aren't familiar at typing URLs. You can read more about this at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,22442,00.html Beaucoup! This Web site is an excellent source for tracking down subject specific search engines. This Web site makes access to more than 1,000 search engines available with a series of link pages that categorize the engines by subject. The search engine categories provided include, but are not limited to: General Search Engines, Multiple Engine Searches, Reviewed Sites/What's new? Reference/language/literature, Educational resources/schools, Arts/graphics, Science/nature/technology, Email/domains/phone numbers, Social/environmental/political, Computers & Programming, Politics/government, Health/foods and diet Choose the subject category you're interested in, click on it, and Beaucoup! takes you to a page full of subject specific search engines. ATM Locator The MasterCard web site has a search engine for finding more than 350,000 ATM machines worldwide. To find an ATM just start by defining a region: Asia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, Middle East/Africa, U.S./Canada. The ATM Locator will then take you through a series of dropdown list boxes where you can narrow your search to country, state or province, and city. Many of the ATM locations also include a quick street map to help you get your directions straight. And There is also a special section for finding ATMs in airports.

Sounds Lycos has a special search feature that lets you search for only sound files. You can also access the sound search engine via a dropdown box from Lycos' main page. HotBot's advanced search provides a similar feature. At the Filez FTP index, you can search directly for sound files to download. The Filez FTP index scans more than 5,000 FTP servers and indexes 75 million files. You can search for sounds in the Sound and Music section on the Filez main page or use the Search For dropdown box and query sound files by the categories like Real Audio, Karoke, Midi, and Wav. The Sound Ring is the portal to a ring of web pages devoted to sound. At the Sound Ring Web site, you'll find links to sites like The Sound Library, The Movie Wavs Page, and Sound America. Yahoo's Multimedia Sound page is another great Internet resources for finding sound related Web sites. Newsgroups have always been great resources for sound files. You can find a good list of sound-related newsgroups under alt.biniaries.sounds.

Search Utilities fSearch is simple utility that puts 90 search engines at your fingertips. fSearch sits in your computer's system tray (on the taskbar). Just click on the blue X icon and you get a pop-up menu that displays 90 search engines in easy-to-use categories. Click on a category and then the search engine you want and fSearch will display a search dialog box. Type in your query, click the search button, and you're on your way - fSearch automatically launches either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. fSearch's categories include Web pages, USENET articles, files and programs, businesses, email addresses, phone numbers and addresses, financial information, music & movies, package tracking, maps, news sites, and meta search engines. You'll also find all the top engines: Yahoo!, Lycos, AltaVista, DejaNews, Excite, Hotbot, 411, WhoWhere?, InfoSeek. There are also meta search engines, Whois, domain name search engines, and a variety of other search engines all organized logically, simply, effectively. fSearch also stores your last 100 searches in the Recent searches section so you can quickly revisit searches that you conducted earlier. fSearch is available for Windows 95 and NT 4.0. You can download a trial copy of fSearch at: http://www.meat.com/software/fsearch/ And finally: Search engine watch Comparing search engines

Putting this all to work With a knowledge of what search engines there are, how they are categorised, and how they work, you are now in a position to use that knowledge when constructing your own pages, and when submitting your pages to search engines. A few basic things you must remember: Always put in meta tags which describe your site, and give a list of keywords. I show you how to do this in another chapter. Register with the local search engines, and those specific to your subject matter. Don't clog up the top of your page with a graphic. The text description is more important. Make sure your headings are descriptive of what your site is about. Try to use the same terms that you put in your keywords meta tag. Yahoo is perhaps the most important search engine to be in. You need to send in a 25 word description of your site. Try sending it in to one of the regional Yahoo sites. AltaVista is probably the next most important. And don't forget Excite, which is used by the Netscape search engine and AOL's NetFind, so the coverage from this engine is very wide. Lycos is another big one. But note that it will not use the text in your Description meta tag. Instead it uses the first 275 characters following the body tag. If you don't want to put a description of your page at that point put in an invisible gif with an Alt tag giving a description of the page. Remember that the meta-search-engines are going to amalgamate the results of searching thru other search engines. Remember that they only display the first ten or so results from each engine. If you aren't in that first ten, you aren't there. Remember that some search engines can't get inside frames to index them. If you put frames on your site make sure that your first page does not, repeat, does not contain any frames.

© John Clare. 1999 runway