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Techno Tips
Recently my wife and I were attempting to purchase a new front door for
our house. We wanted to know if we could apply a stain to the door we
were considering. Since I was online at the time, I went to
a search engine, entered the name of the product and quickly found the
company's WWW site which provided me the answer. What is amazing to
me is not that I found some esoteric answer, but that I would have been
surprised if I hadn't found the answer. I've come to expect that, when I
have a question_almost any question_I can find the answer on the WWW.
We've come so far in such a short time.It was exactly five years ago, summer '93, that I first accessed the WWW. At that point in time, there was very little content available outside of some technical research areas. Now with an estimated 50 million documents on the WWW, we often suffer from the opposite effect. When we search, too much comes back. Here are some of the search techniques I use to weed through the growing number of documents on the WWW. It is important to understand that each search engine is created differently. For that reason, entering the same search in different search engines returns widely varying results. A great place to learn more about the way search engines work is to use a tutorial developed by the University of California, Berkeley at www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html. To search for a phrase or keyword, I use a meta-search service. A meta-search service simultaneously searches several search engines and returns the combined results. This can help you determine which search engine is the best to use for that topic. My favorite meta-search service is Dogpile www.dogpile.com. Dogpile searches against 13 of the most popular search engines. One search engine that Dogpile does not search is Northern Light, www.northernlight.com. This service is especially good for finding information from news sources. It also maintains an index of 4,500 journals that it will search against; however, you must pay to retrieve articles from the journals. One specialized search area that may be of interest to alumni is the "people finder." When I'm asked to locate the e-mail addresses of people, I find that Bigfoot www.bigfoot.com and Infospace infospace.com work best for me. If you have children, you may be concerned about what they find when they search on the WWW. There are search engines that specialize in screening out sites that may not be appropriate for children. The Ramapo Catskill Library has a site with links to these sites. For more information visit www.rcls.org/ksearch.htm. Send me your favorite search engine or technique for searching the WWW. I can be reached through my home page at http://research.umbc.edu/~jack/jack.html. Jack Suess is acting director of university computing services at UMBC.
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