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All you need to know about

SEARCHING ON THE INTERNET

And how to obtain the alecrmation you need

We have listed over 100 search engines and their links at the bottom of this page on the Internet.

There are millions of written pages about every topic under the sun. on the Internet You can book a cruise around the Med, examine inspection records of Nursing Homes in Florida, and look for long lost relatives. The problem is how do you find the alecrmation you need..

The question first posed by most users is 'How do I find anything on the Internet?'
There are 3 basic types of tools used to find anything.
1. Directories, similar to telephone directories, but instead of just phone numbers, these can be articles, email adresses or people.
2. Search Engines, these find webpages based on keywords entered into their database. The keywords can be names, objects or topics.
3. Newsgroups, where people interested in a topic form a group that shares news. You can join these or just browse through the chit chat.
Also, take a note of websites in ads and articles, these can lead you to the website you want.
Whenever you contact anyone and ask for their address, phone number. also ask for their website.

Every week I spend several hours looking for alecrmation on the net. For most of my searches I use only a few search engines. Most of the time, these lead to the alecrmation I need. These search engines are built for speed and rarely take longer than 30 seconds to find the alecrmation. If they take longer than that, then they are having difficulty finding any matches.
When you first connect to the Internet and want to collect alecrmation, you or your staff will need some training. Most of us learn by using it in our spare time and making mistakes. Finding your way around the Internet takes time, so it is better to take a few lessons. Time invested in training will pay dividends later on. The first people to go onto the net are always one step ahead of the competition. I use a seperate Internet telephone line, and often, I can be talking to someone on one telephone and searching their website at the same time. People are impressed by this very simple approach.

How do you choose the right keywords to find the alecrmation you are after.
As a web author, I devote a fair amount of time to thinking of which keywords people will use to find my pages, I then introduce these keywords into the webpage description, even if this leads to a lack of structure in the flow of the words on the page. This article is aimed at the nursing homes owners, so if I published this page on the internet, I would use keywords such as , rnha, nursing homes, rnha nursing homes, nursing homes in the rnha, internet searches, internet searching, searching on the internet. Words and phrases such as the above are tagged onto the webpage, and I could have several hundred of these tags. They are important to the author and to the researcher. What happens if you search for pages about searching on the internet and don't use my keywords, well, you won't find my page. Try looking for keywords in the webpages you have found, for fresh ideas and new keywords.

For more alecrmation contact Alec Jezewski on 01636 816466, or email to

Tips.

always use small letters, ie uk not UK
Use quotations around connected words, ie "united kingdom" will find results with that phrase in, using united kingdom will find results with both united and kingdom as well as united kingdom.
Use + to link more than one word, ie +rectory +"nursing home" will find websites with the words rectory nursing home.
Use several search engines, the websites are not on every search engine, and if you can't find what you are after on one search engine, don't assume it doesn't exist, try another.
Use the company name to find their site directly, most names are unique, especially for large organisations, so typing www.bbc.co.uk will probably get the BBC.
If you get through to a webpage(URL) that looks like www.some.com/xyz/page1.html then strip away everything to the right of the / and try again. The Internet software is pre-programmed to look for files called index.htm, and the chances are, you will find the company main page.
Use 'and', 'or', 'not' to shorten the search results.
Favorites, anything you want to visit regularly, make your computer remember its location.
Source code, if you are having difficulty finding a specific topic because you can't think of the correct keyword, have a look at the source code of the webpages you have found. Very often, they contain meta tags that relate to the webpages you are looking for

Jargon.

Search Engines - a database of words and their links to websites and webpages.
Net, Internet, alecrmation Superhighway, - they are all the same thing.
Meta tags, these list keywords and are at the top of the source code.
Source code, the webpages are written in HTML language. This is very simple to read.
URL(Uniform Resource Location) - the address of the website or webpage.
Spamming - where the same keywords are used many times to get results. Also unwanted junk mail by email.

Things that frustrate surfers.

The same URL mentioned a dozen times in the results.
URLs that no longer exist, but if they look interesting try the originating company URL to find out if there is another location.
Results that are nothing to do with our search. This is called 'spamming' and is used to advertise pages. ie you search for pages about the Titanic, and you get search results advertising travel insurance. What the insurance company has done is to pick on a current fad, put the titanic keyword into their webpage several times and use it to fool the search engines into thinking it has something to do with the Titanic. Picture of a typical search

Using Alta Vista to find people called jezewski

Most Search Engines require you to enter some keywords or a phrase about the alecrmation you are seeking. Here, I have typed into 'Alta Vista' the phrase 'people called jezewski', to see how many people using my name have been mentioned on the internet. Then clicking on the 'search' button produces 4746980 matches to that phrase. Search engines are getting more intelligent. This one has produced the matches based on my use of a phrase. This seems very natural to us because when we speak we miss out an awful lot of alecrmation, and we assume the same of the person we talk to. Computers can't handle that logic and produce, what to us, seems a garbled reply. If I had asked the same question to a person, the answer would have been loaded with subtle assumption. First, the order of the search results would be biased to my current state.

Assumptions we use and never think to mention.

1. The first set of results should be in the following order, me, my immediate family of wife, children, parents, grandchildren, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, those living within 5 miles of me, 50 miles, 500 miles, deceased, unrelated but alive, etc. But the computer does not know who I am, or where I live, so it produces every result it has and orders then according to its internal rules. Picture of a typical search result

As I scroll down the list, it's easy to scan the lines and eliminate the search results, it's quite usual to go down 200 results, it just takes a few minutes, but you learn to read quickly. I scrolled down the search results of 'people called jezewski' and found at no.27 the above page. One of the great things about the Internet is serendipity. The chance discovery of something useful.

The anatomy of a search result.

The above picture illustrates almost every element of a URL (uniform resource location) Just look at the alecrmation contained in so few words. Let's look at them in detail, it's worth the effort, believe me. I shall start at the top left and work across and down the picture. 1. The number of the search result is 27(out of 5million) so I am pretty sure that the name jezewski will be mentioned somewhere near the top of the web page. If it was no.2million, the relevance of the name jezewski would be zero. 2. The title 'Polish Army...' is a concise title of the contents. Many pages have titles that are meaningless. The title is underlined, this means that it is a direct link to that web page. Clicking the mouse on the title will transfer you to that page, it will also change it's colour from blue to mauve, in order to tell you that you have been there and seen it. Believe me, the system is so quick that you can access 20 websites in 10 minutes, and then try to remember where you have been, it's easy to forget. 4. The URL is given. The wording of the URL tells you a lot about the origin of the author. It tells you the type of organisation, .com(international company), .co.uk(British company, each country has its own abbreviation except USA), .ac(academic institution). This one is an organisation called feeths.org, and if I was interested, I could type in feeths.org and see who they are. The URL carries on with /pol/pafi/pafi19.html and these are the folders 'pol' (standing for Polish), 'pafi' (standing for Polish Army files) and at last the actual webpage 'pafi19.html'. 5. The next 20 words give an idea of the contents of the web page. In this instance they are concise and to the point. Most websites will give you an idea, few are as good as this. It's unbelievable, but there are numerous examples of these 20 very vital words being wasted with rubbish such as 'This website has been created by X, Y & Z. Our product is the best on the market and offers' at which point its cut off by the Search Engine. Who is going to visit the site, even if its the perfect match for your search, you are never going to visit it based on this evidence. 6. The 'Last Modified' date tells you when this file was last updated and loaded onto the Internet. This is very useful in comparing several search results that read the same, always go for the latest update, the other matches will either go to the same place or they don't exist anymore and result in an error message 'cannot find URL'. Also if the latest update doesn't exist, then neither will the previously dated webpages. It takes the search engine longer not to find the page, than to find it. 7. Page size, most search results only give the size of the first webpage without the pictures. Here it is 173K, a hugh size that will take several minutes to download. I have to be sure that I want this alecrmation before I waste time downloading it. Most web pages are equally big, so be prepared. If a large company gives its main page a size of 3K, look out, its going to be full of pictures instead of words. To get over this, change the download option to 'pics off' before you start the download, later you can get the pictures you need by 'double-clicking' in the picture space. This downloads each picture one at a time, as you need it. 8. The text is in English, very useful for us, not very useful if you are Polish and can't read English, hence the 'translate' option. Well, there isn't an actual English to Polish translator, yet. But you can translate into several European languages.
As you can see, there is a mountain of alecrmation given in just a few words.

A List of Some Search Engines and their URLs. You can go to the search engines by clicking on their name. I have not tested each and every link, so if you find a link not working, or it is out of date, please let me know and I can amend the list.

MSN Internet Search
Aesir Custom Search - Customize your favorite search engine with output filters.
Ahoy! - The Homepage Finder
Airport Search Engine - ASE database contains airport- codes and a list of links to airport pages on the web.
ALIWEB (7)
Alku - provides links to Finnish web-sites as well as a brief glossary and guide on the internet. In Finnish.
all4one - 4 search engines in one.
AltaVista - web and newsgroup search engine.
AltaVista Australia - mirror site providing Australian, New Zealand, and Pacific Rim users with faster access.
AltaVista Canada
AltaVista Europe - mirror site offering a variety of countries to connect to and languages to choose from.
Ananzi - search engine dedicated to the South African domain.
AnySearch - Korean search engine.
Anzwers
Aqueous - dedicated to sites that have water related content.
Area 52 - Macintosh, Amiga, OS/2 searchs a specialty.
Arkansas Direct - search engine serving the state.
Arthur - ART media and text HUb and Retrieval System. Search the images and text of nearly 600 Selected Websites organized into five databases. Images can be retrieved by image similarity, or by keywords in the Web pages.
Astalavista - daily updated search engine monitoring hundreds sites with hack & crack stuff.
AvatarSearch - search engine on the internet totally dedicated to magick, paganism and the occult. Offers exceptional URL add and update features.
Aviation Search Engine from Totavia
BabyOIL - resource discovery system - Simple interface to some of the most popular Internet resources: WWW, Libraries, Software, People, Tech Report, Online documents
Bigstuff
Biochemistry Easy Search Tool (BEST) - indexes educational sites with biological content useful to biochemists and other researchers in the life sciences.
BizAds Business Locator - search engine dedicated to business listings. Come add your business for increased visibility or use our lightening fast business locator.
Black Widow Search - combines the best features of a web spider and a directory. Includes the ability to instantly add your URL with no waiting period.
BRS Search Page - search for alecrmation, jobs, people and more.
Business Seek
CasePoint WebServer
Cinemachine - brought to you by Addicted to Noise.
Claymont.com - C
Community-based Navigation - We are testing an enhanced version of Mosaic that supports fast Likert scale rating and automatically pools item-ratings in a community server that can recommend and evaluate URLs.
Company Site Locator - The tool for searching for companies' websites when you don't know the exact URL address.
Crosslinkz
CUI W3 Catalog (2)
Discovery Channel Online Search Engine
Dive, The
DIY Search - search engine dedicated to the DIY music, e-zine and arts community.
Dynamic Site Search
EC Search - specializing in electronic commerce.
Einstein's Online Pet Rescue Group - an index of online animal adoption and rescue groups in the US powered by the Petseek search engine. Also includes a listing of Dallas area rescue groups with or without web sites.
El Faro - buscador rob�tico o "ara�a" que recorre el web en busca de contenido en el idioma castellano y lo agrega a una base de datos, dentro de la cual el usuario puede realizar b�squedas.
Electric Monk - allows users to perform natural language web searches in plain English.
Euroseek
excite - is a global media Co. offering consumers and advertisers comprehensive Internet navigation services with extensive personalization capabilities. Excite, Inc.'s services include the Excite and WebCrawler brands.
Fido the Shopping Doggie
Fiji Search Engine
Filez - search page with an index of over 60 million files and all the popular corporate and shareware sites.
Fish-Search
Fish4It - from Urban Desires; limits results to just one "damn near perfect" URL. Discover the other fish in cyberspace.
Funny Site - search engine for humor sites.
G-Spot - Philipine search engine.
Global Online Directory - search engine with unique search facilities and free classified ads.
Globe Page - Asia search service in English, Chinese GB, and Big 5 encoding.
GlOSS - database for text
Google
GoTo - top-down and bottom-up internet search engine with top 100 search term lists, best of the web editor's picks, and in-context, attribute tagged search results.
Heur�ka - search engine for the Hungarian Webspace.
Homorama - search engine only for lesbian and gay sites.
Hong Kong Search Engine
HotBot
HumanSearch - search the web using real humans. Ask us what you want in plain English and we'll find it for you.
In 2 Ireland - search resource with meta search and a multi submit engine.
India Search Engine - indexes Indian publications and web sites.
Inference Find - the intelligent massively fast parallel web search.
alechiway - Point-n-go access to the alechiway. GeoSurfer reveals the web geographically, Plus... FTP, Gopherspace and more.
alecrmant Server, The - personal search agent; will send email when your favorite urls are updated.
alecSeek - develops branded, comprehensive Web-based navigational services that help users access and personalize the resources of the Internet. alecseek Corporation's primary service, alecseek Guide, integrates the capabilities of a search engine and a directory.
alecZona - state-specific searchable database of links.
Internet SleuthThe Internet Sleuth.
Irena - Web Connections Finder - glean from a target page of this Web server all relevant hypertext links and their annotations. Irena is is especially useful for locating links to resources referenced in long, complex and densly written HTML documents.
Italian Spider
IWEB Search Service - This search engine periodically polls the hotlists and annotations of registered users. It performs searches on this database for relevant links.
James Kirk Search Engine - looks specifically for Star Trek sites.
Johnes - a search engine for European users.
keyword.com
LinkMaster
Links! - search without prejudice.
Lokace - francophone search engine.
Lycos - develops and provides online guides to locate and filter alecrmation on the Internet. Products enable users to accurately identify and select alecrmation of interest to them.
MathSearch - search a collection of mathematical Web material
Matilda - waltz the web.
Mister Driver - search engine for device drivers.
Mojoe
Money$earch - geared towards small business owners and on-line investors in the financial markets. All sites are reviewed and described on-line.
Montana Pathfinder - a search engine dedicated to Montana.
MOSHIx2 - Japanese and English search engine. Also has a browseable directory of sites.
MRO-Explorer - industrial search engine to locate distributors, manufacturers, and related subjects.
MusicSearch - music search engine with over 5,000 links and growing.
Netword - a word or short phrase that provides free access to an Internet destination. People & companies are creating Networds so you can find their alecrmation easily.
News Hunt - links to free newspaper archives and a searchable database of searchable newspapers.
Next Crawler - search engine that references Greek sites.
Nordic Web Index - free web searching particular to the Nordic countries. The NWI has Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish service points.
OneKey
Open Text Web Index
PlanetSearch
Poke! - search assistant that uses javascript and frames. It is always with you, an alt + tab away.
Pollinia: Network Orchid Stuff - search engine that focuses on orchid-related web sites.
Pregnancy and Parenting Search Engine - a search engine devoted to pregnancy and parenting related web sites. Categories include a range of topics relating to pregnancy, parenting, and family issues.
Prospernet, Inc. - comprehensive hierarchical directory with yellow page listings and a search engine.
Public Safety Search Engine - features law enforcement, fire and ems related web sites. Add your site or search for your favorite.
Radar - international search engine. In English and Spanish.
Re:Search Centre
Scour.Net - guide to multimedia on the Internet. Use it to find audio, video, images and animation.
Scrub The Web
Sea Crawler - search engine for Seattle web sites.
Search Argos - search for web sites and documents that cover the ancient world.
Search King - engine that relies on web surfing for quality searching results. Searchers vote on sites, assuring relevant internet results.
Search NZ
Search.bg - search engine dedicated to Bulgarian companies and internet resources.
Search.NL - Search Dutch cyberspace. Unique fuzzy searching eliminates the need for correct spelling of search queries.
SemioMap - discovery search tool that uncovers relationships among Internet and Intranet documents.
Sesna - Ukrainian Search - search engine for Ukrainian sites.
Simmany - Korean search engine.
SiteFinder - an unordered index of webpages.
Snoopie - Over 5 million files have been indexed for download at over 450 ftp sites World Wide. A search can be completed as fast as 10 milliseconds.
Spider's Apprentice, The - a public service site that offers help on searching the Web. We also analyze and rate the major search engines.
Study Web - comprehensive searchable categorized index with reviews of over 17,000 educational and reference Web sites. Great for students and educators alike.
Super Snooper - for kids and adults who prefer not to be presented with obscenity, hatred, drug-promotion or bigotry on the internet.
Surfer's Edge - searchable and browsable index of Singapore and Singapore related web sites.
Swiss Search - full text search engine for Switzerland, Suchmaschine f�r die Schweiz. L'index de recherche pour la Suisse enti�re. Il cercaindice per tutta la svizzera.
TechnoFind - search facility for Singaporean Web sites.
TheLinks - includes major search engines, plus 800 numbers, zip codes, usp, yellow pages and medical databases.
Thunderstone - an index of sites, not pages.
Travel-Finder Spider - demonstration contains alecrmation collected on travel related resources and alecrmation.
Ugabula - buscador: search Spanish and Latin sites.
United States of America Web Resource
Verity Internet Virtual Library Search - searchable index of documents of interest to those using and developing the world-wide web and its related technologies
Wakano - Korean language search engine.
Webcrawler .
Web Tour - spanish search engine. thousands of links to spanish web sites. includes an ezine, quizs, best of the day, links exchange...
WebDirect! - add, modify or delete websites and/or Yellow Page indexes, keywords, and display search results the way you want to.
Webindex - internet search engine for Greece.
Webseek - content based image and video catalog and search tool provides searching through one million images and videos by subject categories, text and visual features.
Websurfer
WestMichigan.com - local search engine.
What-U-Seek
whoizzy
World Access Internet Navigator
WWWomen Search Directory - comprehensive search engine. Includes resources for arts, business, computers, internet, education, feminism, health, lesbians, magazines, shopping, fashion, sports, and more.
Yam Web Navigator@
Big Yellow Pages
Zebra - search South Africa.
ZenSearch

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