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Search Directories Search directories are hierarchical databases with references to Web sites. The Web sites that are included are hand picked by living human beings and classified according to the rules of that particular search service. Yahoo is the mother of all search directories. Looksmart is also quite popular, as is the Open Directory, a catalogue compiled by enthusiasts from all over the world. Directories are very useful when you have no more than a general notion of what you are looking for. The first page normally gives you the most general categories (like "Computers and Internet" or "Education"). Click your way down the hierarchy to the right category, select the Web site you find the most interesting and start reading. Search Engines Search engines are -- well -- "engines" or "robots" that crawl the Web looking for new Web pages. These robots read the Web pages and put the text (or parts of the text) into a large database or index that you may access. None of them cover the whole Net, but some of them are quite large. The major players in this field are Alta Vista, Northern Light, Hot Bot, Lycos and Google. However, the distinction between engines and directories is not as clear cut as it used to be. All the major search directories will feed you results from a search engine if it cannot find what you are looking for in their own directory. Yahoo is using the search engine Google for this purpose. On the other hand, some of the search engines will serve information from search directories before giving you data from the search engine's database. Lycos, for instance, will give you hits from the Open Directory. Alta Vista has a hierarchical directory similar to Yahoo. Web Searching Tips 1. Use many different databases and Webguides. Here is a good page which provides links and descriptions of quite a few. There are also many specialized search engines that can be helpful. 2. Use unique words in your search phrase. 3. Use phrase searching whenever possible. You will have to check the help link in the search engine you are using to find out how to preform phrase searching in each database, though most require you surround the phrase in quote marks. 4. Never input a question as a search phrase unless using a human-powered search service like Ask Jeeves. Instead, put together unique keywords. If needed join these key words with boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). 5. Never look at more than 1 page of results links when looking for information. If you design your search well, you should be able to find the information you are looking for on first several result links. It can also be helpful to use the browser "find in page" function. |