- How do you find what you're looking for on the Web if you don't know it's address (or "URL" - Universal Resource Locator)?.
- With a search engine, of course! Most everyone knows about the most popular search engines such as Yahoo! and Snap!, but there are many, many more search engines in existence, one of which may be better suited to the type of searching you do than the popular ones.
- There are different '"types" of search engines. The 'type" normally having more to do with how the search engine finds and indexes the information and URLs that it presents to you as a result of your search than with how you interact with the search engine.
The types listed here are "Directory", "Robot" and "Metasearch". These can be explained quite simply.
The 'directory' type of search engine indexes and sorts by using hierarchical categories, similar to using "State>County>City>Street>Housenumber" to describe a particular location of a house. You click on ever-narrower categories to 'close in' on what you're searching for, although most search engines of this type also allow the user to type in, and search on, keywords.
The 'robot' type uses software called "crawlers", "spiders", "worms", etc. to visit web site addresses and index and categorize the things it finds there, which it stores until a user searches with sufficiently similar keywords to warrant the search engine displaying a "result" (or "hit).
A 'metasearch' engine simply sends your keywords out to several search engines at once and displays the results to you. Theoretically, this type of search engine would appear to be the most effective since many search engines are working on your request at once. In practice, this isn't necessarily so. Many factors are involved, such as what and how the search engines indexed and "scored" (sorted by relevance) the results that it selected to display. So just try many of the search engines listed below. You will eventually find a search engine (or two) that works best for you, seeming to almost always display exactly what you were looking for.- Note that there are many "specialty" search engines, which search only for books, digital music, etc. Generally speaking (but not always) these "search engines" give results that are particular to the site on which you're searching. For example, at a site called MegaBooks.com, a search on their "search engine" may give results that indicate that there is a particular book at a super low price for sale at...guess where?...MegaBooks.com..., and may not indicate that the same book can also be had at at even lower price at Amazon.com. There's nothing wrong with this type of search engine if you do happen to be searching on MegaBooks.com for their price and availability of a certain book. However, due to their limited capability when searching for resources on the Internet (or "Web") in general, this type is not included here.
- Although there are exceptions to these 'rules', (like with every other 'rule'), these are the generally accepted conventions when using a search engine:
- Enter the keyword(s) that you are searching for and click the appropriate button ('Start', 'Go', 'Search', etc.) or hit 'Enter' to begin the search.
- Start with as many keywords as you can and then reduce them as necessary to try to narrow the results of the search to relevant material only. For example, if you are looking for information regarding certain song lyrics, enter "the last word of the song that Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sang at the the Met at the concert held there in 1979 to which I wore a red jacket" (which will surely produce 0 results or "hits") and then reduce the number of keywords you've entered and search again. In this example, when you get down to "Stones Mick Met 1979 lyrics", you will probably start getting results that prove more useful. The results are simply a list of possible resources that you will have to click on one at a time and do more research, but at least the search engines give you a place to start looking, since it would be next to impossible to just start typing URLs into your browser at random and try to find what you are looking for.
- Some search engines require that you place a plus sign or the word and between all the words that you deem necessary to be included in the search and others require that you place all the words inside quotation marks and still others allow you to select "Exact Phrase" when searching. All these methods produce essentially the same thing - search results that include ALL the words you've entered as keywords. For example, whether you enter (as required by the particular search engine) "red dogs", red +dogs, or select "Exact Phrase Only" and then enter red dogs, the search engine will show no results that include only the word red or the word dog, it will display ONLY results that include red AND dog.
So when you initiate a search in which you want all the keywords you have entered to be considered necessary in the search, you may use a plus sign, the word and, quotation marks or select "Exact Phrase", whichever method the particular search engine utilizes.- On the other hand, sometimes you may be searching for something and you want to exclude certain words that you don't want to be considered in the search. For example, perhaps you want information on all kinds of dogs except red dogs. You can use a minus sign between the keywords you enter, or the word not or the search engine may allow you to enter separately the words that you don't want included. So you may enter dogs not red, dogs -red, or otherwise exclude certain words using the search engines settings, if available, and expect the same results.
- There are some search engines like 'Ask Jeeves' that allow you to use natural language queries. These attempt to include and exclude certain 'keywords' on their own, accomplishing this by ignoring words that are not to be included in the search such as "I", "me", "my", etc. and includes only the pertinent words. For example, you may enter "Where can I find a red 1999 Harley-Davidson motorcycle for less than $8000?" or "What does it mean when my computer says 'Error300a' and my screen turns blue?" (without the quotation marks in both cases) and sometimes achieve good results.
- Using these tips, you should be able to conduct searches without a tremendous amount of difficulty. Your results will get much better and your searching will become much easier once you've found a particular search engine (or a few, as search engines seem to provide good results on some topics more often than others) that you like and seems to provide you with good potential results most often. Only experience gained by trying different searches on different search engines using different methods will allow you to do this.