Chapter 5
Once You Get There . . . How Do You Find Anything?
A needle in a haystack . . . how do you find anything on the Web?
I've promised you a world of fascinating information never before accessible to non-geeks. Millions of sites covering every topic imaginable . . . Wait a minute. You should know by now when a lawyer offers you something that terrific for free, there's a catch.
What's the catch? . . . You've got to find the stuff yourself!
By now, we are all familiar with the domain names registered by major corporations, such as www.disney.com and www.sony.com and www.nbc.com. (None of us ever had any idea what "dot com" meant, but it's now become a common part of our vocabulary.) But what if you're looking for someone and don't know if they have a website? And even if you know they have one, if you don't already know the domain name, how do you find them?
In the early days of the Web, yellow-pages books with domain names were published in hard copy, listing categories of sites, the same way a phone book would list types of businesses. These went out of fashion as people learned how to find their way around on their own. But a new edition of a popular yellow pages is the exception to the rule. The Internet Kids & Family Yellow Pages, written by Jean Armour Polly (the original "Net-Mom") and published by Osborne/McGraw Hill has sold over a million copies. (I intend to take lessons in book marketing from Jean.) Recently revised and released, it's a quick way to find lots of family-friendly sites. Jean has reviewed them all to make sure they're "childsafe." As Net-Mom, Jean was one of the early Web pioneers and knows everything there is to know about kid resources online. You can find Jean at www.netmom.com and can e-mail her at mom@netmom.com.) Tell her I sent you.
Almost all the yellow pages other than Jean's were replaced by search engines (indices of websites) where you can search for websites registered with the search engine. Any site could be registered with the search engine. Until then, Internet users would not be able to find your website unless they knew your domain name. (It's like having an unlisted phone number.) As the search engines matured, they added robot software (called bots, spiders and crawlers), which search the Web to find the websites and index them based on the words used in their site.
Now there are many search engines on the Web. The most popular ones are: AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo!
There are two ways to use a search engine—searching by typing a specific word or words joined by a connector, or by using directories, which are divided into different topics (except for AltaVista, which only uses the specific word or phrase search).
Web search indices can index pages based on the information contained at hundreds of thousands of sites, and each of those sites have many subsites, documents and graphics (each qualifies as a separate URL file). (AltaVista has over 31 million web pages indexed.) Their robot spiders are software programs (AltaVista's is called "Scooter") that scour the Web searching for websites. The spiders search every word at the website, and in some cases, all pages linked to from those sites. It then indexes all those sites, based upon the number of search words used and how often they're used.
When you want to search for something specific, you should do a "keyword" search, listing all the words that are necessary to your search. When the search results are displayed for you, the pages with the most matches are listed first. The rest are listed in declining order.
The best thing about using this search method is that you can access many more sites and can customize your search. The worst thing is that your search may turn up umpteen zillion sites if you don't frame it properly. (Trust me . . . I've been there.) You should read the help files at the particular engine to learn how to improve your search results, so you'll get an answer, not a research project.
When you want to do a broader search, or aren't exactly sure of what you're looking for, you should use a directory search. When websites are registered with a directory-type search engine, people who work for the search engine review the sites and classify them under topics (just like encyclopedias classify information under topics). Directory-type search engines have far fewer websites categorized than the index sites do, just because it takes much longer to classify them than to just index them electronically by keywords. But when you don't know where to start on a search, the directories can be very helpful.
The directory topics range from very general to very specific, depending on how far down the topic list you go. Once you've found the right topic, a list of websites that cover the topic will be listed. You can get to those sites by clicking on their titles. Your Web browser will then whisk you away to check out the site. When you want to try another site from the search result list, you just click on the "Back" button of your browser and you're back where you started.
After you've been online for awhile, you'll find that some search engines work better for you than others. You may also find that you'll use one for certain kinds of searches, and others for a different kind of search. Before you start your search, decide what kind of information you need. Indices have many more sites, but you may find that many of them are totally irrelevant. (Bots aren't, after all, as smart as humans, even though they work faster and take shorter lunch breaks.) But since humans need to classify the sites for the directory search engines, there are far fewer sites listed in those directories. Overkill or undershooting . . . pick your poison.
If you just can't make up your mind, there are some sites that let you type in one search which goes out to more than one search engine at the same time. All4one.com is one of the most popular group search engines. (www.all4one.com)
Whether you prefer one search engine over another, you should get used to playing with all of them, because each search engine has different strengths and weaknesses. (For example, I use Time Warner's Pathfinder for all media searches. If I want to see which magazines have done an article on something, I look there first. However, I use AltaVista first on all broader topics and to find more specific information. If I have no idea where to begin, or am just surfing, I'll use Yahoo!)
Try to find a combination that works for you.
Kids' search engines . . . safe searching and surfing
Some search engines, concerned about adult content being accessible to children, have set up a special search engine site just for kids.
Yahooligans!
Yahooligans! is Yahoo!'s search engine designed specially for kids seven to twelve years old. It has a limited list of sites that it links to, each designed to be kid-friendly.
Yahooligans! only lists sites that pass certain screening. The links are divided into eight categories, ranging from "Around the World" (politics and history) and "Science and Oddities" to "Entertainment" and "The Scoop" (comics, newspapers and weather).
There are also features such as links to "new" sites and those rated "cool." Some of the "cool" sites were dressed-up advertisements, like the link to Disney Books. Yahooligans! makes it easy to request that a site be added or deleted from their roster. Real people (not bots) review all sites to make sure that they are appropriate for kids.
Note that this search engine is not intended to function as a substitute for parental control software. For example, a search for an R-rated movie may show no matches, but the link to movie-related sites such as www.777film.com will give your child information about such movies.
Surf Watch's new search function allows parents to limit their children's searches to Yahooligans! It is a safer search environment than the general search engines, especially for younger kids.
Net Shepherd / AltaVista Cooperation
Net Shepherd, the parental control software that uses a database of over 300,000 prescreened sites, has announced its intention to cooperate with AltaVista to prepare special search databases, prescreened for special interest groups.
Don Sandford, Net Shepherd's president, explained that he expected to set up a prescreened family friendly search engine within the next year. I'll be keeping an eye out for it.
Bookmarking—Leaving a Trail of Breadcrumbs
You've read the section on finding your way around. You've found a site. Even better, it's the site you meant to find! Congratulations! This site is everything you ever hoped it would be . . . and has all the information you need or has links to "related" sites you want to read. But you don't want to read everything now. Now what? (Hmmm . . . it's sort of a "computerbook cliffhanger" isn't it?)
Bookmarking is the easiest way to return to a site over and over again. Just as you would slip a bookmark into a book to find your way back to the page you marked, you can do this online too. Each web browser and online service has its own way to mark a site. (Come on, you didn't expect them to make this easy, did you?) They also call it different things. Netscape uses the term "bookmarking," but with Explorer it is called "favorites." Whatever they call it, it works the same way.
Using Netscape Navigator as the example, you just click on the "Bookmarks" button on the toolbar at the top of your screen. Then place your mouse cursor on "Add bookmark" and click. That's it. The software saves the name and address of whatever page you are currently on to a list of bookmarks. Anytime you want to visit the sight again, just open your bookmark menu, scroll down to the site you want . . . and voila! No need to type in the address each time, and no need to remember what letters are upper case and which are lower!
Remember, though, that if you have a site on your bookmark list that you don't want your child to see (and you don't have software to block that site), you might want to use this option sparingly or rename it something far less enticing than "Bouncy Babes in Bikinis." Something like "Accounting aspects of short form mergers" is likely to guarantee that no one will ever try to use that bookmark.
Hello Information? . . . I'd Like the E-mail Address for . . .
I saw a piece on television where someone claimed they could find anyone's
e-mail address easily. I obviously need lessons from her, because I don't think it's easy at all. Maybe in the future there will be a central e-mail registry, but for now, you have to search several different places and hope you get lucky.
There are several directory websites that contain e-mail addresses and sometimes home addresses and phone numbers. These are called "white pages." They get their information from public telephone directories, voluntary listings (when people register this information directly with the site) and spiders.
If you want to be found, register your e-mail or your business address with them. (Never include home addresses.) On the other hand, if you "vant to be alone . . .," make sure you're not listed.
Finding People, Places, and Things . . . a few website search locations
Business Yellow Pages www.bigbook.com
Dun and Bradstreet's Companies online www.companiesonline.com
Directory assistance www.555–1212.com
Directory of 800 numbers att.net/dir800
Directory Organization—
companies, e-mail, etc. www.dir.org
411—Internet white pages www.four11.com
E-mail addresses, phone and address,
communities, home pages,
internet phones, U.S.
government pages (Who Where) www.whowhere.com
E-mail directory search www.bigfoot.com
Finding people www.1800ussearch.com
Finding people and addresses www.switchboard.com
Finding telephone area or country codes www.inconnect.com/~americom/
aclookup.html
Looking up people and businesses www.databaseamerica.com
National Telephone Book—White Page www.yahoo.com/search/people
NYNEX nationwide yellow pages www.niyp.com/newvisit.html
Yellow Pages www.yellownet.com
Yellow pages on-line www.ypo.com
Zip code look-up (U.S. Postal Service) www.usps.gov/ncsc
Cybersleuthing . . . a tip to finding an unlisted e-mail address
If people aren't listed in any of the white pages I mentioned above, you may be able to find them if you know some things about them. Do you know their online service provider? You can e-mail the POSTMASTER@whatever Internet service provider they use .com, asking them to forward a message to the person you're trying to reach. They won't always do it, but it's worth a shot.