Search engines

With millions of web pages currently online, you can spend a lifetime surfing the World Wide Web, following links from one place to another. Amusing perhaps, but not very efficient if you are after some specific information. In fact one of the biggest complaints we hear concerns the difficulty of finding information. Searching the Internet requires part skill, part luck and a little bit of art.

You've probably heard of Google or Yahoo! or other so-called Internet search engines. There are literally dozens of these tools to help you locate what you're looking for. The trick though is understanding how they work, so you can use the right tool for the job.

Types of search engines
Search engines breakdown into two categories:

  1. directories and
  2. indexes.
Directories, such as Yahoo!, are good at identifying general information. They group web sites together under similar categories, such as Internet tutorials, English universities and Paris museums. The results of your search will be a list of web sites related to the subject you are searching for. If you are interested in locating the site for the Louvre museum, for instance, try using a directory.

But let's say you want more specific information, such as biographical information about Leonardo da Vinci. Web indexes are the way to go, because they search all the contents of a website. Indexes use software programs called spiders or robots that scour the Internet, analysing millions of web pages and newsgroup postings, indexing all of the words.

Indexes like Google find individual pages of a website that match your search, even if the site itself has nothing to do with what you are looking for. You can often find unexpected gems of information this way, but be prepared to wade through a lot of irrelevant information too.

Before we get into the specifics of some of the more popular search engines, let's do a search so you can see how they work and how you can develop an efficient search strategy.

Metasearches (e.g. Beaucoup and Excite)
Rather than search each directory or index individually, you can submit a query to multiple search engines by doing a metasearch.