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Searching the Internet
(Adapted from Robin William’s Web Book)
Try
These
There are two basic kinds of search tools on the web: search
engines and directories.
Fact: An important thing to know is that when you click that button,
no one is running all over the world looking at every we page trying to
find what you want.
•Every service has its own database of information. When you click
a service’s Search button, you are searching through that
service’s database.
•Services search in different ways, and each service has different
criteria for their databases.
•Some use humans to to sort through web sites, catalog information
and rate the sites.
•Others use automatic software called robots or spiders
that identify a site’s content depending on how many times a
word appears on a page or how many other pages are linked to it.
A search tool might look at the title of your page, the first paragraph,
or other information to determine where your site belongs in its database.
That’s why you get three different lists of results when you search
through three different services.
Directories
Yahoo
•Directories group web pages into subject categories.
Yahoo is a directory. Go to Yahoo and
click on a topic; that topic leads to various categories under that topic,
each one leads to more categories and more subcategories.
Using a directory is a great way to find entire websites on subjects,
such as Shakespeare, auto mechanics, or Persian cats. It is not a good
way to find your grandmother’s web page that is part of her nephew’s
site, a current theory of anti-gravity...
Search Engines
Google
Search engines have automatic software “robots” or
“spiders” that search through the web, newsgroups, or other
sources, and look for words rather than subjects. How each robot or spider
selects information varies, but it is all gathered and organized into
the search engine’s database.
A search engine is the place to go when you are looking for particular
words, answers to questions, or tidbits of information.
Try
TheseDifferent Search Engines
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