Iona Prep Physics Searching

 

Finding a particular organization, document, or piece of information on the Web might seem to be a daunting task. Are you intimidated by search engines? Do boolean operators make you squeamish? If so, you might begin your search by using

• The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• The Encyclopedia , which works exactly like the print version.
• Ask Jeeves , an extremely friendly search engine.

After you've "eased into" Internet searching, you may want to use a search engine to obtain more detailed information. A Search Engine has Web content indexed, and will perform a search for you. There is no cost for this service. Revenue is provided by the advertisements they display. P.C.Magazine which is published by Ziff-Davis reviewed a large number of Web Search Sites in the December 1,1998 issue. Some of the information below is summarized from that article, but I have included only a few sites which I have used personally.

Here is a very handy TUTORIAL on Web searching.

For tips on advanced searching, check out this site.

General Search Sites:

• Google! An ongoing research project at Stanford Universit.This site tries to decide which documents in the result set you might want to see first. (My personal favorite.)
• AltaVista can handle fairly simple search terms well and complex terms with less common words.
• Direct Hit This site uses a relevance engine which analyzes the activities of millions of previous Internet searches in attempting to return the most relevant hits.
• HotBot Graphical query-building aids and a large Web index make this a popular site.
• Northern Light has advanced search features which lets you refine your search. You can construct very specifc and detailed queries using this engine.
• YAHOO! A popular site which has a great number of categories. Good place to start a search. Searches tend to return a large number of sites. For very specific terms, you might have better luck with AltaVista.

If you want to check several sites at once, use one of the following sites. It will construct a query and submit it to multiple search engines.

• Dogpile searches AltaVista, Excite, GoTo.com, Yahoo!, and many others. Returns are arranged by search engine. There are frequent repetitions.
• MetaCrawler searches AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, and others. This engine integrates returns, avoiding repetitions.
• Savvy Search lets you enter your query into a form to metasearch the major search engines and guides, or select from a list of specialized metasearch / metashop categories.
• ProFusion lets you choose which engines it will search. It also provides help on how to form a Boolean or phrase query.

MetaSearch engine ©Carl Adler. Used with permission.

Last Update: by Br. Robert W. Harris

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