Fall 97
Winter 98

by Denise Østed

"There are 17 Gazillion matches for your search term".

Now what?

The Internet contains more information than a searcher can possibly ever absorb. This makes it an extremely valuable tool, but can also frustrate you beyond belief. Learning how to use search tools properly can cut down on some of that frustration.

The first thing to remember is that no matter what the Internet claims about itself, it is not a thinking entity. You only get out what you put in. If you do a search on “women,” you will get back a huge list of sites related to women, but some might be about feminism, some about breast cancer, some about pornography, some about how women belong in the home raising children, some about an individual woman’s art or musings. The most basic rule about searching the Internet is that you must know what you are looking for. Are you really looking for information about "women" or do you want to find out more about women’s shelters in Western Canada for Aboriginal women? Be very specific. And be sure of your spelling!

Another approach is to start with that most general search and then see what comes up. From the huge listing you get, you might be able to pick out some keywords to use when you try your search again. It is best, though, to avoid very common words like "dog" or "art" or "water" because that pretty much guarantees an overwhelming number of responses. Try "Siberian Huskies" or "oil painting" or "freshwater seas" instead.

Each search tool has its own special commands for narrowing down your searches. There will almost always be a link on the search page called "Help" or "Enhance your search" or "Search syntax" or something similar. It’s a good idea to spend a few minutes exploring that search tool’s hints and tips for effective searching; this will help you narrow your search. Some very common tricks include putting phrases in quotation marks to indicate that each word in the phrase must be found in that order, so that "Brandon University" will not give you all sites for Brandon and all sites for universities.

Another trick is to use the plus sign or the minus sign. For example, if you are looking for information on growing flowers in a greenhouse, you could search for ***greenhouse +flowers -environment*** which will return sites about flowers and greenhouses, but no sites about the greenhouse effect. You can also use “and” instead of a plus sign: ***greenhouse and flowers***. There should be no space between the plus or minus sign and the word with which it is associated.

Another thing to remember is that search tools don’t actually understand the words you are searching for. A search on ***feminist*** might or might not turn up the same sites as a search on ***feminism***. So it’s good to search on a few similar words. Another useful idea is thinking of synonyms for your search term, or rephrasing it in some way. So a search on women’s organizations can be rephrased as ***women’s groups, feminist organizations, non-profit feminist counseling, women’s shelters, women and AIDS support groups,*** etc. Remember to put these phrases in quotation marks if the search tool you use supports that feature, otherwise the last example might give you all the pages about women, about AIDS, about support, and about groups. And that is probably not what you want! The more specific you are about what you seek, the less superfluous responses will be generated by the search tool. If you end up with too few sites listed, you can then get more general - but it’s easier to handle seven sites than seven hundred thousand.

Many search engines are case sensitive. If you search for "Brown" you will get results related to people or places. If you search on "brown" you will get those results, but also information about the colour brown. Capitalized words are usually treated as proper names, while lower-case words will return results on all possible case types of that word.

You can also find email addresses on the Internet. The best way to find someone’s email address, though, is to just pick up the phone and ask her for it. If you can’t do that, try a search tool like Four11 at
www.four11.com/
which allows you to search by first name, last name, city, country, organization, past high school or university, etc. The information here is all provided by the person you are looking for, so the usefulness of email directories is limited by the desire of people to be found.

A great resource for finding woman-related sites is Femina, at
http://femina.cybergrrl.com/
They index “female-friendly sites and information on the World Wide Web,” and they allow full searches as well as searches by website descriptions, URLs, or keywords. I like to start with Femina when I am looking for woman-related content.

Use several search tools. Despite their claims, there is no single search tool which has listed every Web site on the net. If you don’t find what you are looking for, try another search tool. Each search tool stores and retrieves information differently, so you will also get different results on the same search when you use different search tools. Some of the major search engines follow, with my own editorial commentary:

Alta Vista

www.altavista.digital.com/
has a large database, is fast, and has good help pages for refining your searches. It will retrieve results in languages other than English, as well.

InfoSeek

www.infoseek.com/
is also quite fast, although it only shows you the first hundred or so hits and then offers the rest if you pay. There are few dead (expired) links turned up by InfoSeek, and the pages are updated often. InfoSeek gives good results for phrase searching.

Excite

WebCrawler

Lycos

www.lycos.com/
is another huge database, although I find it turns up more dead links than some other search tools. Still, because it has indexed so many pages, I often find useful information here when I can’t find it elsewhere. It is very fast and easy to use, but it can be busy during peak hours. Lycos allows searches specific to the USA, Great Britain, Nederland, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain, and Italy (in the language of each country).

Maple Square

maplesquare.com/
is a Canadian site, which is very useful when you are looking for Canadian content. When I first used it, it was quite new and rather small. I haven’t used it for a while, but I know it is adding more links all the time, and growing quickly.

Yahoo!

www.yahoo.com/
is a great place to start looking for almost any topic. Yahoo! organizes sites into categories, so you can narrow your search to a particular category and search there. It is very easy to use, and is a good search tool for beginners.

When you find what you are looking for, bookmark it!!!! Otherwise you will have to waste your time going back to search tools to find that resource.

I think of my bookmark file as my most valuable search tool.

Often, search tools will be very busy during peak hours. Most of the big search tools are located in the States, and they are accessed most during working hours and early evening. If you find a search tool is too slow, you can try another one, or else try your search again later.

Once you have managed to narrow your search, you aren’t home free. Almost anyone with Internet access can publish her own material on the Web, but that doesn’t mean the information you find is accurate, up-to-date, or even meant to be helpful at all. As with any other source of information (such as books, newspapers, television, and conversations), you must always approach the information with a critical mind. Remember that behind every Web site is a person who has her own agenda when she puts up those pages.

Search tools are not the only way to find information on the Web. Most sites have a set of links to other related sites. Even if you come across a page which isn’t exactly what you are looking for, it is worth taking the time to see if they have any links. I often find the most useful information that way.

The most important thing I have discovered about search engines over the last few years is that it pays off to spend a few minutes reading the search tips before I start typing in my query. Those few minutes can save a lot of time and prevent a lot of aggravation. Good luck!

fullmoon@euronet.nl

| Top | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 |
Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Home |