Internet Power Searching Finding Pearls in a Zillion Grains of Sand

The Internet  During the past two years, Web content has expanded enormously.  As the Internet erupted, search engines, metasearch engines, and intelligent agents with value-added features came on the scene and gradually made a more organized information retrieval process.  In a 1997 survey of database producers, of 54 leading databases from 38 database producers, 35 searchable databases were on the web.

Search Engine Size  In April 1998, the article in Science measured the size of the Internet and reported 320 million pages at that time, the figure grew to more than 380 million in a matter of months.  Nevertheless, one of the search engines, HotBot, has estimated that only 200 million pages are searchable within their system.  As good as they may sound, there are both technical and physical reasons that search engine coverage is incomplete.

Search Engine: Incomplete  Information retrieval technology may not necessarily require exact matches and returns pages with related words. May return documents that don’t exist anymore.  Documents are changed after an index picks it up  Sites that require passwords are not returned  Therefore, it is important for researchers to amass knowledge about a range of resources and learn how to use search engines for a range of requests

Types of Search Engines  AltaVista: One of the most powerful and popular search engines; Good for specific searches; Provides a translator between English and five languages that is useful but has been criticized as not “too good”; Overall it is not user friendly as Hotbot, but once mastered is the favorite of many.  Excite: Good for searches on broad, general topics; Fast access to a small number of relevant sites; Quite user friendly

Search Engines (cont.)  HotBot: Overall, the most user friendly search engine; Provides quick pull down menus and search results appear much quicker than others; Best for large searches and quick scanning, users can review one hundred results at a time.  NorthernLight: Provides contents that encompasses both the Web and Northern Lights’s Special Collections, some of which are not available to other vendors; Advanced, power and industry searches are available.

Search Engines (cont.)  Yahoo: Contains 750,000 sites; World Yahoos is available in different country versions.  DejaNews and Reference: Search engines for newsgroups or mailing lists.

Metasearch Engines  Websites that send a search to several search engines all at once.      Advantageous for getting quick overview

Basic Hints and Tips  Get familiar with which search engine is the right one for the job  Much Internet research is trial and error  Consider main words and phrases that describe the topic