The Secrets of Successful Searching-An Excerptby Michael Miller
The most common activity for web users isn't online shopping or auctions, and it isn't downloading MP3 files, and it isn't even playing online games or viewing dirty pictures. No, the most common web-based activity is searching. That's because the Web is big and disorganized, so you have to actively search for just about anything you want to find. The reality is that most users spend at least part of every Internet session searching for some type of information—and hating every minute of it!
There are a number of perfectly valid reasons people hate searching the Web. First, searching isn't easy—or, at least, it's not always intuitive. Second, it isn't immediately gratifying, because you seldom find what you're looking for. (On the first try, anyway.) And third, it isn't fun—unless you're one of those odd birds who thinks thumbing back and forth through the cross references in an encyclopedia is a blast.
Those objections aside, you're still forced to search the Web for the information you want. Fortunately, the more you know about how and where to search, the more likely it is you'll find what you're looking for, fast.
The Needle in the Haystack Problem
Here's something you need to know: Web searching is more an art than a science. You need to develop a feel for how and where to search; following a set of hard and fast rules won't always deliver the best results. That's because every search site not only operates differently, but also contains a different set of data; entering the same identical query at different sites more often than not produces wildly different results.
So, even though the act of searching is deceptively easy (just enter a query in a search box and click a button), finding useful information is hard. Of course, it doesn't help that the Internet is big—really, really big—more than 80 billion documents and growing! With these numbers, your odds of finding a single page of information on the Web are in the neighborhood of 80 billion to one.
The size problem is compounded by the fact that information online is not stored or organized in any logical fashion. You have to realize that the Internet itself is not run or managed by any central organization; the Web is nothing more than a collection of millions of individual computers, all connected by a bunch of wires crisscrossing the globe. Nobody is in charge; therefore, everybody has to manage his or her own computers and servers with no rules or regulations for guidance.
In addition, there are no standards or guidelines for laying out web pages so that certain types of information are always presented the same way, using the same words, positioned in the same place. There is no guarantee that the topic described in a web page's title is even mentioned in the text of the page. There is no assurance that a page that was on the Web yesterday will still be there tomorrow.
In short, the Web is a mess.
The Art of Searching
Not surprisingly, there have been several attempts over the years to organize this mess we call the Internet. This book, Que's Official Internet Yellow Pages, is one such attempt. However, as helpful as this book is, all attempts to organize the Internet ultimately fall short, simply because the Internet is so big and so disorganized and growing so fast. Even the best attempts (and I view this book as one of the best) can document only a small part of the Internet; literally billions of other web pages go undocumented.
So, when you're looking for something on the Internet, you should first go to a good printed directory, such as this book. But if you can't find what you're looking for there—or if you're looking for even more current information—where do you turn?
You are now faced with the prospect of searching the Internet. But if there are no rules for storing information on the Internet, what procedures can you follow when you're searching for information?
To get good results—results that zero in precisely on the information you want, without throwing in pages and pages of irrelevant data—you need to know the right way to search. And the right way to search is all about asking the right questions.
Imagine you're a detective questioning a suspect, and you have only a limited number of questions you can ask. Do you waste a question by asking, "Where were you on the night of the crime?" The suspect can answer that question many different ways, most of them vague: "California." "Home." "Out." "Someplace better than here."
A better question is one that is more precise, and allows less latitude in the way it is answered. "Were you at 1234 Berrywood Lane on the night of the crime?" For this question, there are only two acceptable answers: "Yes" or "No." Either of these answers will give you the information you're looking for, with no chance for evasion or misinterpretation.
Searching the Web is like playing detective. Ask the right questions, and you get useful answers. Ask vague questions, and you get useless answers.
Effective searching requires a combination of innate ability, productive habits, and specific skills. It also helps to have a kind of "sixth sense" about where to look for information, and a lot of patience to make it through those long stretches when you can't seem to find anything useful, no matter how hard you try.
In other words, successful searching is a blend of art and science, of intuition and expertise—something some are born with, and others have to learn.
The Difference Between Search Engines and Directories—And Why You Should Care
There are hundreds of websites that enable you to search the Internet for various types of information. The best of these sites are among the most popular sites on the Web, period—even though each of these sites approaches the search problem in its own unique fashion.
Directories: Manually Cataloging Web Pages
One approach to organizing the Web is to physically look at each web page and stick each one into a hand-picked category. After you collect enough web pages, you have something called a directory. Directories can be very appealing, because they enable you to browse for a website by category, often finding what you didn't know you were really looking for. Most directories also provide a Search box for searching for specific sites in the directory.
A directory doesn't search the Web; in fact, a directory catalogs only a very small part of the Web. But a directory is very organized, and very easy to use, and lots and lots of people use web directories every day.
In fact, one of the most popular websites today is a directory. Yahoo! catalogs close to two million individual websites in its well-organized directory, and people seem to like it—even though Yahoo!'s directory content represents less than 1/10 of 1% of the total number of pages currently published on the Web.
Many directories are very specialized—designed to be used by people sharing a common interest or having a special need. For example, Education Planet (http://www.educationplanet.com/) catalogs information and websites specifically for teachers.
Search Engines: Scouring the Web, Automatically
It's important to note that a directory is not a search engine. A search engine is not powered by human hands; instead, a search engine uses a special type of software program (called a spider or crawler) to roam the Web automatically, feeding what it finds back to a massive bank of computers. These computers hold indexes of the Web. In some cases, entire web pages are indexed; in other cases, only the titles and important words on a page are indexed. (Different search engines operate differently, you see.)
In any case, as the spiders and crawlers operate like little robot web surfers, the computers back at home base create a huge index (or database) of what was found. The largest search engine index (Google) contains more than 6 billion entries—which still leaves the vast majority of the Web untouched and unavailable to searchers.
When you go to a search engine, you enter a query into a search box on the home page. This query represents, to the best of your descriptive ability, the specific information that you're looking for. When you click the Search button, your query is sent to the search engine's index—not out to the Internet itself. (You never actually search the Web itself; you search only the index that was created by the spiders crawling the Web.) The search engine then creates a list of pages in its index that match, to one degree or another, the query that you entered.
And that's how you get results from a search engine.
Directories or Search Engines: Which Is Better?
So, which is better, a directory or a search engine? What is better for you depends on what you want:
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If you want the most results, use a search engine. (A search engine's automatic index is much bigger than a manually constructed directory.)
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If you want the best hand-picked results, use a directory. (People generally make better decisions than machines.)
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If you want the most current results, use a search engine. (Search engine bots crawl the Web daily; it takes time for human beings to manually enter and delete directory entries.)
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If you want the best-organized results, ..
