Net searching

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The quickest way to locate data on the Net is to use a search engine.

Popular examples include Alta-Vista, Lycos, and Infoseek.

Other forms of searching exist [Gopher and Telnet] but with these you need to know the data location.

If you are reading this whilst connected to the Internet, hot links to search engines are listed at the bottom of this page.

Quality

Remember that anybody can put data on the Net.

You need to evaluate the quality of the information you recover.

Always give the source of any information you use.

There are new conventions for citing electronic sources.

Search engines

A search engine [SE] will scan its database (or the Net itself) for whatever word(s) you type in the FIND box.

It will then return a number of 'hits' - possibly rated according to likely significance.

Most of the popular SEs use slightly different search methods and databases.

If you don't find what you want with one, try another.

Some will quote the first few lines of an extract.

Search techniques

Be as specific and 'narrow' as possible in defining your request.

General and 'wide' requests will result in too many hits.

Example

Say you were researching pineapple production in Brazil.

A search on 'pineapple' might result in 10,000 hits.

[You have ten thousand documents to evaluate!].

Choosing 'pineapples+Brazil+1997' narrows the search to documents which include all these terms.

Boolean terms

Most SEs will recognise the use of terms which help you to narrow your request.

'Bacon AND tomato' will locate documents which contain both these terms.

'Bacon OR tomato' will locate documents which contain either of these terms.

'Bacon NOT tomato' will locate documents which contain one term, but not the other.

You can also use keyboard symbols to refine a search:

+	plus	=	and
-	minus	=	not
(  )	brackets	=	group of words
"  "	quotes	=	groups of words
*	star	=	wildcard

The wildcard is powerful but should be used with care.

A search for Colum* would return Columbus, Columbia, Columbian, Column, and so on.

General points

Letter case doesn't matter with most SEs. 'Smith', 'smith' and 'SMITH' are all the same.

Don't assume the data you are looking for must be available on line.

Thousands of pages are added to the Web daily, but the total is still far less than the volume of printed material in big libraries.

Many SEs will now allow you to narrow your searches by

• language (Spanish, English French)
• date (in last 2/3 days, week, month)
• continent (co.uk, com.ca, ac.au)
• source (Web, newsgroups, companies)

For instance, search for PKZIPW.EXE for the latest version of the popular Windows compression utility.

This is worth repeating

Always acknowledge your sources.

Downloading is like photocopying. Say where you found the data.

Use the new conventions for citing electronic sources.

Hotlinks

AltaVista Excite Google Infoseek HotBot WebCrawler Yahoo! Lycos Northern Light