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How to find information on the internet
Have you ever tried to find a specific information on the Internet?
Did you have any problems finding the desired facts?
Then read this guide on how to search the internet for information!
If don´t have a hard time finding what you´re looking fore, read it any way!
Maybe you get a new angel on how to optimize your search routines.
It´s sad that the greatest thing about Internet is the enormous amount of information on it.
And the worst thing is, the enormous amount of information.
I can do nothing but agree to that.
I remember that day I connected my computer to Internet.
I wanted to read about my favorite music group Pearl jam,
so I clicked my self to the AltaVista search page and typed "Pearl jam".
Kasplash! 86thousand something hits!
Try to find any thing among that ;)
The first thing you´ll have to question your self is,
what type of information you are looking for?
There are some different categories of information you may want to access
* Information on the WWW
* Find a person (e-mail and homepage)
* Find a software program or file
Ok, let´s start with exploring the WWW.
The easiest way to find what you are looking for is through the search engines.
Altavista,Yahoo and Excite are in my opinion the best. They all got their strong & weak sides,
but all together makes an quite useful tool that covers almost the whole Internet.
Altavista is run by Digital Equipment Corp. It gives you access to 31 million pages found on 627,000 servers
and four million articles from 14,000 Use net news groups.(These numbers will probably be out of date when you read it!)
That´s quiet incredible numbers if you keep in mind that you must register your homepage to get it searchable in AltaVista.
The best thing about this search engine (except the size of the database) is the flexible way to define the hot words for your site.
Simply just type down the key words in your index file and then a search robot gets them back to the AltaVista database.
The bad thing about Altavista is the way it presents the search results :(
Yahoo on the other side, is pretty much the opposite of AltaVista. It got a great interface with
the pages sorted in different categories and the categories sorted in sub categories and the....
Yahoos weakness is that it uses the key words that is defined when a page is registered.
So if the site is updated with new information won´t it be updated in Yahoos database.
Excite is a so called web crawler. That means that it´s database comes from an search robot
that follows all links it can get and sends information about all pages it finds to the database.
It gives a LARGE database, but maybe not an 100% reliable one.
Next step will be to go to the search engine you prefer and type down what you´re looking for.
You will probably get A LOT of hits, so try to be as precise as possible. For example let´s
say you´re looking for information on the NHL hockey team Colorado. First you search on
the word hockey and you get thousands of hits. Then add NHL to your search pattern, you´ll
probably still have to many hits. So finally add Colorado to the search pattern, now will there be a much smaller list of sites.
But you can still get more exact, let´s say you want to get facts on their goalkeeper.
Then simply add goalkeeper to your search pattern. This is how you must work,
trying to get down the hits to a minimum so you can look through them all for the desired information.
Most of the worlds companies and organizations got their own domains these days.
So if your looking for a companies or organizations homepage, try to direct your web browser to this address
"http://www.copmaniesname.com" or "http://www.organizationsname.org".
If that don´t work try to replace the com or org with the country suffix of the country it is active in.
For example "http://www.organizationsname.se" for an organization in sweden. This will work surpriseling often.
* Find a person (e-mail and homepage)
* Information on the WWW
* Find a software program or file
If you´re looking for a person on the net, then good luck...(you´ll need it.).
The easiest way is probably to ask for the address personally from the person, but
then you´ll lose the surprise effect.(if you want any!)
Unfortunately isn´t there any complete web addressbook and there will probably
never be any either. The ones that exists are volunteer databases that you´ll have
to add your address to by your self. So they are far from being complete and nearly
all of them is focused on U.S.A.
My advice is that before you start search through all the www´s addressbooks like
a horny teen rabbit, ask yourself some questions.
Does the person you´re looking for go in school?
If that´s true then find the homepage off that school and search for a students list.
Don´t you find one? Then send an e-mail to the postmaster or web master
and ask for the address to your friend.
Does the person got an e-mail account at work?
Then go to the companies web site and look for a list over employes.
Or if there aren´t any ask the postmaster or web master for the e-mail address.
Is the person connected by phone through a Internet provider?
Then find the providers homepage and look for a list over costumers,
otherwise send an e-mail to the postmaster or web master.
Dosen´t that work?
Then start searching through e-mail databases.
* Find a software program or file
* Information on the WWW
* Find a person (e-mail and homepage)
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