| If you're new to the Internet, you will quickly learn that
finding stuff can be tricky. This is due to two things: 1)The World Wide Web is a
huge place, and it's growing everyday. 2)Web pages move, and change, new ones appear
and old ones dissappear on a daily basis. The only way to find anything on the Web is to
use a search engine (or get an address (or URL) from someone else. Below are links
to the best search engines (in my opinion.) I've included some tips on searching as
well, so that you can find what you want as quickly as possible.
The Tips:
1)Generally, the more you type the more accurate your search. So if you are
looking for a new sports car, you will get a better result from typing: sports car
sales than you will if you type: sports car If you know what make of
car you want, put that in too. For instance: Porsche sales will be even
more precise.
2)If you want the search engine to see the words as a phrase, rather than a bunch of
words, put them in quotes. For example, using "Ann of Green Gables" will
make the engine look for that entire phrase, so you will find pages related to that
series, but if you type: ann of green gables, then the engine will look for pages
with the words ann, green, and gables - you will probably still get some
pages about the book, but you may also get a web page made by someone named Ann, who likes
the colour green.
3)If you are doing a search, and you want one word to be in every page you find, you
can use a + sign. So if you type full +moon, every page you find will have
the word moon, but may not have the word full in it.
4)If you don't want a word to appear in any of the pages you find, use the - sign.
So if you want stories for children without dragons, type: children's stories
-dragons
5)If you do a search and don't find what you are looking for, try using a different
word for one of the words you used. I was looking for a formula to calculate time
one day, so I typed: time formula - instead of getting mathematical formulas, I
got information on Formula One racing, with lap times. So I switched to: time
algorithms - and that worked.
The Engines: (My favourites are listed first.)
Google - Even better than Altavista,
and faster for me, I've switched to this one for most searches.
Metacrawler - This engine is
very cool. Enter one search and it searches several other engines for
you. Possibly the most extensive.
Altavista - I used to use this the most, and I
find it is pretty fast and accurate.
Hotbot - This one was recently rated the best
engine by one of the computer magazines (I forget which.) I find it is a little
slow, but is quite accurate.
Webcrawler - This is one of the originals - I
don't use it often, but when I do, I like it.
Yahoo - This is probably the most popular.
I use it once in a while. The nice thing about this site is that they are not
only a search engine, they have a lot of good information on almost any topic as well. |
