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Searching
When you do a search, it's important to realize that you are not actually searching the Internet but rather a catalog or directory of sites compiled by private companies. Each company includes whatever sites they've found so far and all are continuously updating their databases. They may restrict the sites they include to particular topics, sponsors or types of information. So it is entirely possible that there is something of interest to you on the Internet that your search fails to find. Since each of the different search tools uses its own directory, it is a good idea to perform the same search using different search tools.
Overview
There is a vast wealth of information on the Internet but how do you find what you're looking for? By using one of the many search tools available to help you. AT&T Worldnet Service provides you with ready access to several top search tools through the Search button near the top of your screen on any of their Web pages.
There are three basic ways to search for information on the Internet:
- If you are interested in a particular field, say music, you can look at the AT&T Worldnet Service pages on these topics.Each week, their editors search the Internet and highlight for you the top sites in each field of interest, which cover a wide range of subjects for home, business and school use.
- If you want to find information in a more specific category, say musical instruments, there are several tools which provide detailed indexes for their catalogs of Internet sites. You can look up information just as you would in an encyclopedia or a card catalog at the library.
- If you are looking for very specific information, say how to make violins, you'll do best using a keyword search. In this case you type in one or more words that describe your topic and the search tools will return a list of Internet sites that have related information.
Regardless of the type of search you do, the results will basically be a list of Internet sites and possibly abstracts or ratings. To visit a site simply click on it's title. If you do a keyword search, you may also get some sites included in your search results that are completely unrelated to what you had in mind although they contain your keyword. Some of the sites contained in your search results may even include questionable or objectionable material. Check the URL of the site and read the abstract to determine its suitability before visiting the site.
Search Tools
There are many search tools (also called search engines) available on the Internet and they offer different features including:
- Abstracts
Some search engines return a just a list of sites while others include an abstract of the site. This abstract is often pulled directly from the site and contains whatever the site's author wrote in the first few lines. Therefore, the abstract may or may not be descriptive of what you'll find at the site but still provides more information that just the title alone. - Relevancy
Some search engine companies rank Internet sites for relevancy to their intended topics. How do they determine relevancy? The Web site is examined to determine how many times the keyword appears at the beginning of a sentence and how often it appears with other words that indicate its importance. If we were studying "violins" and skimming through the article, our interest might perk up if we saw sentences that began; "In summary, violins are..." or "However, violins are the most ..." Relevancy is expressed as a percent with 100% being the most relevant and a lower number being less relevant. - Point Reviews
Certain search engines have gained their reputations and their popularity because of their stringent review of newly added Web sites. These companies not only review a site for relevancy but they also make a qualitative judgment of the site and provide a brief summary of the site's main topic.
Recommended Tools
- Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of their search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's they've networked together to create a superfast search engine.
- AltaVista (according to their Web page) offers the world's fastest, most comprehensive search service, performing 50 million search queries each day in over 25 languages.
- Lycos is one of the largest Internet catalogs, making it a valuable resource that is recognized throughout the Internet community.
- Excite provides full-text keyword and concept-based searching of Web sites, newsgroups, and classifieds, making it a great tool for searching the Internet. It also provides reviews of 50, 000 Web sites, sortable by site or relevancy of match.
- Yahoo! is one of the pioneers in categorizing and rating Internet sites for presentation and content. It is a hierarchical, subject-oriented guide to the Internet.
Conducting a Search
To do your first search, put a keyword in the Search box near the top of your att.net home page and click the Go button.
- What Keywords Should You Use?
Search engines work in many different ways - some search titles or headers of documents, some search the documents themselves, while others search an index assigned to the site by the search company's reviewer. Many tools will search literally for your keywords (including spelling errors) while others try to match the concept. So, a document of interest to you may actually be in the directory that you're searching but your search failed to find it based on your keywords. So, try repeating the search using alternate keywords.
If you find you're getting too many sites that are not what you had in mind, try using multiple keywords. For example, if you wanted to find information on lions you might try the keyword "lion". Your list of results would probably include information about these cats but also lots of sites that relate to sports teams.You can weed these out by adding a second keyword, say "cats", after the word "lion". You can add even more keywords to further restrict the search.
If you still haven't found what you're looking for, your search may be too restrictive. To increase your chances of success, do several searches each with a few keywords rather than one search with lots of keywords. If you didn't find anything of interest, you can try different keywords, a different tool, or a more complex search.
- More Complex Searches
Each search tool uses different notation for entering a complex combination of keywords. For example, if you search for "cat lions", many tools will by default or the words together so that you will be given a list of sites that contain either the word cat or the word lions. A search for "lions cat" may give you a different result.
Many tools will let you change the way your keywords are combined and therefore let you control your search. To do this, you need to supply additional information to help the search engines ignore irrelevant sites and include only the relevant ones. This is done through the use of Boolean logic and the use of the words AND, OR, and NOT. Let's look at how this works.
In our example above, we searched for lions and got back lots of information on sports teams. We could use the word NOT to eliminate these by specifying our keywords to be "lions NOT sports". Or, we could make sure we are dealing with the animals by using the word AND and specifying our keywords to be "lions AND cats". Or, we could look for information on one of several types of large cats by using the word OR and specifying our keywords to be "tigers OR lions OR leopards". To use this Boolean logic, you'll need to read the instructions for each search tool to see what notation to use and what options are available. You can find these instructions from AT&T Worldnet Service's Find page by clicking on the logo of the tool you want to use.
As you can see, there are many ways of getting at the same information. So, if you are not finding what you want, try using different keywords or combining them in different ways. And be sure to try more than one search tool.