IntroductionInternet Background Information Online Reference Tools & "Pearls"
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Hot [Searching] Tips: BrowsersFrom the December 1996 Issue of PC WorldWant to see the other parts of this article? It's in "Searching is my Business: A Gumshoe's Guide to the Web - Chpt. 6
Bookmark Your Queries. Bookmark the first page of query results so you can return to it. Instead of typing Dashiell Hammett whenever you're looking for some detective trivia, just go back to the saved query, and the search engine will rerun it--possibly with new, updated results. Skip Scrolling. Okay, so you found a likely Web page--but it's about 50 screens long. Never fear--in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, just type -F and enter a word you're looking for. The browser will jump to the first appearance of that word on the current page. Odd Characters. If you're tired of typing out Boolean operators, you can use symbols instead: & (ampersand) instead of AND, | (the pipe character) instead of OR, ! (exclamation point) in place of NOT, and ~ (tilde) for NEAR. For example, type bogart ~ bacall instead of bogart NEAR bacall. Looking for Images? AltaVista can search for text in an HTML tag. The query image :comet.jpg will return any page referencing a file called 'comet.jpg' in an image tag--and, with a name like that, it's a good bet that file will be a picture of a comet. Use Plain English. Excite is designed to handle conversational sentences well, so queries like "Where is a good Italian restaurant in New York City?" or "learn how to speak Chinese" can be surprisingly effective. Find Quote Sources. To find sources for short quotations, such as, "That which does not destroy me makes me stronger," just enter the quote into Excite. It's all right if you don't get the quotation exactly right--there's a good chance that the results pages will tell you where it came from and give you the correct wording as well. Eliminate Irrelevant Words. While Lycos doesn't support Boolean searches, you can use the minus sign ( - ) to refine your searches. Words with the minus sign are less likely to appear in the list of query results. For example, enter the query business -monkey if you want to find out about business, but not monkey business. Find Whole Words. Lycos treats an entry as a substring as well as a complete word. If you enter the word graph, Lycos will search for graphs, graphics, and graphite. To limit Lycos to the exact word you entered, put a period (.) at the end of the word. Find Specific Information. In addition to Web and Usenet searching, Infoseek offers options that let you search for company information, e-mail addresses, recent news, and Frequently Asked Question files. Just select the directory you want to search from the drop-down list on the main query page. Keep Your Caps On. To search for proper names, capitalize them when entering your query: Hammer, not hammer.
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