Chapter 13
In This Chapter
Starting with basic search strategies
Finding what you’re looking for on the web
Making use of built-in searches in your browser
Finding people on the web
Creating your own starting page
“Okay, all this great stuff is out there on the Internet. How do I find it?” That’s an excellent question — thanks for asking. Questions like that one are what make this country strong and vibrant. We salute you and say, “Keep asking questions!” Next question, please.
Oh, you want an answer to your question. Fortunately, quite a bit of stuff-finding stuff (that’s a technical term) is on the web. More particularly, free services known as search engines and directories are available that cover most of the interesting material on the web. There’s even a free encyclopedia, written by Internet users like you.
You can search in dozens or hundreds of different ways, depending on what you’re looking for and how you prefer to search. Search can take some practice because billions of web pages are lurking out there, most of which have nothing to do with the topic you’re looking for. (John has remarked that his ideal restaurant has only one item on the menu, but it’s exactly what he wants. The Internet is about as far from that ideal as you can possibly imagine.)
To provide a smidgen of structure to this discussion, we describe several different sorts of searches:
To find topics, we use the various online search engines and directories, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. To find people, however, we use directories of people — those are (fortunately) different from directories of web pages. If you’re wondering what we’re talking about, read on!
When we look for topics on the Internet, we always begin with a search engine, usually Google. (The word google has now been “verbed,” much to the dismay of the Google trademark lawyers.)
You use all search engines in more or less the same way:
Flip to Chapter 6 if you don’t know what a browser is.
You can try one of these URLs (web addresses): www.bing.com, www.google.com, or www.yahoo.com. We list the URLs of other search sites later in this section.
Or, just click in the Search bar in the upper-right corner of your browser window, to the right of the Address bar. (In Chrome, it’s the same box.)
After a delay (usually brief, but after all, the web is big), the search engine returns a listing of links to pages that it thinks match your keywords. The full list of links that match your keywords may be way too long to deal with — say, 300,000 of them — but the search engine tries to put them in a reasonable order and lets you look at them a page at a time.
One trick is to pick keywords that relate to your topic from two or three different directions, such as ethiopian restaurants dubuque or war women song. Here’s the secret: Think of words that would be on a page containing the information you want. After some clicking around to get the hang of it, you find all sorts of good stuff.
When you see a list of links to topic areas, click a topic area of interest. In the directory approach, you begin at a general topic and follow links to subtopics. Each page has links to pages that become increasingly specific until they link to actual pages that are likely to be of interest.
Once upon a time in an Internet far, far away, lots of search engines and directories battled with each other to see which would be the favorite. Participants were AltaVista and Dogpile and lots of other sites you can find in earlier editions of this book. Well, it seems that the first pan galactic search war is pretty much over, with Google the victor — at least for now. However, Microsoft is fighting back with its Bing search engine. Visit net.gurus.org/search for all the exciting developments.
Our favorite web search engine is Google. It has little (software) robots that spend their time merrily visiting web pages and reporting what they see. It makes a humongous index of which words occurred in which pages; when you search for a topic, it picks pages from the index that contain the words you asked for. Google uses a sophisticated ranking system, based on how many other websites refer to each page in the index. Usually, the Google ranking puts the best pages first, right after a few sites that have paid to be listed at the top.
Using Google or any other search engine is an exercise in remote-control mind reading. You have to guess words that will appear on the pages you’re looking for. Sometimes it’s easy — if you’re looking for recipes for Key lime pie, key lime pie is a good set of search words because you know the name of what you’re looking for. On the other hand, if you have forgotten that the capital of France is Paris, it’s sometimes hard to tease a useful page out of a search engine because you don’t know which words to look for. (If you try searching for France capital, some search engines show you information about capital gains taxation in France, or Fort de France, which is the capital of the French overseas départment of Martinique. Many people must ask this question, because Google takes pity on you and tells you at the top: “Best guess for France capital is Paris.”)
Now that we have you all discouraged, try some Google searches. Direct your browser to www.google.com. You see a screen like the one shown in Figure 13-1.
Type some search terms and Google finds the pages that best match your terms. That’s “best match,” not “match” — if it can’t match all the terms, it finds pages that match as well as possible. Google ignores words that occur too often to be usable as index terms, both the obvious (ones such as and, the, and of) and merely routine (terms such as internet and mail). These rules can sound somewhat discouraging, but in fact it’s still not hard to get useful results from Google. You just have to think up good search terms. Try the recipe example by typing key lime pie and clicking the Search button. You see a response like the one shown in Figure 13-2.
Your results won’t look exactly like Figure 13-2 because Google will have updated its database since this book was published. (These results have gotten a lot better since we started using this example in earlier editions of this book. Now it understands that you’re probably looking for a recipe.) Most of the pages that Google found do, in fact, have something to do with Key lime pie — many have good recipes. Google says it found 1,130,000 matches (yow!), but in the interest of sanity it shows you about 100 of them, 10 at a time. Although that’s still probably more than you want to look at, you should at least look at the next couple of screens of matches if the first screen doesn’t have what you want. Because the list includes a lot of restaurants with Key lime pie on the menu and a hair salon named Key Lime Pie, you can simply narrow the search to only recipes by adding the keyword recipe. Search engines are dumb; you have to add the intelligence. At the bottom of the Google screen are page numbers; click Next to go to the next page.
The links in the right column and sometimes at the top of the results are sponsored links — that is, paid ads, ranked by how much the advertiser was willing to pay. Often they’re worth clicking, but remember that they’re ads. Google identifies paid ads with a little Ad icon or label.
The I’m Feeling Lucky button searches and takes you directly to the first link, which works, well, when you’re lucky.
Although Google looks very simple, it has plenty of other options that can be handy. You can
Microsoft never cedes any part of the computer business without a struggle to the death, and web search is no exception. After many false starts over many years, its Bing search engine, shown in Figure 13-3, shows promise. (Bing’s background images changes daily.) Its basic operation is a lot like Google: You type some search terms and it finds you some web pages. If you would rather see images or videos, look at the clickable Images and Videos links at the top of the page (unless Microsoft moves them), just like Google. If you want maps and satellite images, use the Maps link, just like the one at Google. If you’re looking for news stories, well, you get the idea, even though Bing is reputed to mean Bing Is Not Google. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Google must be feeling extremely flattered.
Bing isn’t exactly the same as Google. In most cases, in its results, it suggests related searches you might want to try. The video search runs previews of the videos it found if you mouse over any of them, which is kind of cute. Its satellite images are different from Google’s, so you might see a clearer view in one than in the other. Overall, we don’t find any overwhelming reason to prefer Bing, but it’s worth a look.
One significant difference in Bing is that Microsoft has made it easy to embed Bing searches into other websites, including a split of the money from any ads in the search results, so you can expect to find Bing lurking in lots of other places on the web.
Sometimes a web search just doesn’t find what you’re looking for. Coming up with the right search terms can be tricky if no specific word or phrase sums up what you want to know. This is the moment to try a web directory. If you know in general but not in detail what you’re looking for, clicking up and down through directory pages is a good way to narrow your search and find pages of interest.
Yahoo! is one of the oldest directories — and still a good one. You can search for entries or click from category to category until you find something you like. Start at dir.yahoo.com. As with all web pages, the exact design may have changed by the time you read this section. A whole bunch of categories and subcategories are listed on the left; click any of them to see another page that has even more subcategories and links to actual web pages. You can click a link to a page if you see one you like, or click a sub-subcategory, and so on. Figure 13-4 shows the Yahoo! Directory page for Games in Recreation.
Yahoo! also has a search engine, but it’s actually Bing underneath.
If you’re looking for the scoop on most topics, Wikipedia is a helpful place to start. You can search for article titles or article text. Words in the article body that are highlighted in blue link to other articles in Wikipedia. Many articles also have links to external websites that have more information on the topic. Articles are created and edited by a volunteer team of more than 300,000 active contributors. Wikipedias exist in dozens of other languages as well. (Adding the en characters at the beginning of its web address gets you the English version. Check out is.wikipedia.org if you’ve ever wondered what the Icelandic language looks like.)
Anyone can edit most Wikipedia articles whenever they want. This concept might seem to be a prescription for chaos, but most articles are watched over by interested volunteers, and inappropriate edits are quickly reversed, so the overall quality remains remarkably high. If you add information, you are expected to include a link to your source; like all encyclopedias, Wikipedia is not the place for original research or personal anecdotes.
Articles are supposed to reflect a neutral point of view (NPOV, in Wikispeak), but a few topics — such as abortion, creationism, and Middle East politics — are continually debated. Wikipedia isn’t as authoritative as conventional works, like Encyclopædia Britannica, but its articles are usually up to date and to the point, with side issues dealt with by links to other articles. One particularly cool Wikipedia feature is its collection of comprehensive lists, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists, on all sorts of arcane subjects. One of our favorites is the list of countries with electric mains power plugs, voltages, and frequencies; type mains power systems in Wikipedia’s Search box to find it.
After you surf around Yahoo!, Google, and Bing for a while, you may want to check out the competition. Here are some sites that provide specialized types of searches:
Finding people on the Internet is surprisingly easy. It’s so easy that, indeed, sometimes it’s creepy. Two overlapping categories of people-finders are available: those that look for people’s email and web addresses and those that look for people’s phone numbers and street addresses.
The process of finding email and web addresses is hit-and-miss. Because no online equivalent to the telephone company’s official phone book has ever existed, your best bet is to type into Google a person’s name and a few other identifying words (such as the town where the person lives and the company where the person works) to see whether any of the matches it finds includes an address. Finding addresses by searching used to be pretty easy, but in recent years, as spammers have taken to scraping off the web every address they can find, a lot of websites now munge (obscure) or delete email addresses.
Type someone’s name and address at Google (for the address, type at least the state abbreviation, but more is better), and it shows you matches from phone book listings.
Here are some other sites that search for people:
Every search engine wants to be your best friend, which, no doubt by coincidence, will increase its market share. (Who? Us? Opinionated?) To cement this friendship, browser makers go to great effort to arrange things so that when you type some search words, the search happens on its own search engine rather than on anyone else’s.
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all have the Search bar to the right of the Address bar, as shown in Figure 13-6.
If you type a word or phrase in the Search bar, your browser opens your preferred search engine and displays the results of a search for whatever you typed. Or, if you type on the Address bar an entry that doesn’t look like an address, it pretends that you typed it on the Search bar and searches anyway. (Google Chrome has only one box where you type something, and it decides what you want.) How convenient is that! You can specify which search engine you want this feature to use:
Every search engine vendor offers a toolbar that you can add to your browser. The toolbar is a bar above your browser’s main window with the Search bar and some other stuff on it, such as links to relevant websites and sometimes browser tools such as pop-up blockers. Back when browsers were young and had no Search bars or built-in pop-up blockers, the toolbars were somewhat useful. These days, they’re mostly a way to force another search-engine-specific Search bar into your browser, taking up space on your screen that would otherwise be available to look at web pages (refer to Figure 13-7).
We generally recommend that you decline any invitations to install browser toolbars, because their value is negligible. If a specific toolbar has a specific feature you want that isn’t otherwise available in your browser, such as the page rank display on the Google toolbar, it doesn’t hurt to install it, other than losing that half-inch of screen real estate.