Search Engines and Directories
-
A directory contains listings for web sites arranged by categories and
sub-categories. An example is Yahoo at
http://www.yahoo.com
or http://www.yahoo.ca. or
http://www.yahooligans.com
[the Yahoo site for younger people]. Directories can be annoying because
they lead you from category through endless sub-categories. There
are, however, several advantages to directories: they tend to contain
"cleaned up sites" that some human has looked at, reviewed and found worth
while. They also help a lot when you need help choosing topics.
You will find fewer "hits" in directories, but those that you do find,
will likely be very on-topic.
-
Search engines search all of the Internet. Some search engines [http://www.mckinley.com]
allow you to select "cleaned up" family sites. Search engines make
little distinction between good and bad sites, clean and inappropriate
sites. You will find many more "hits" through a search engine than
a directory, but they may not have lots to do with your topic. Great
search engines include
Google,
Webcrawler,
Infoseek,
Dogpile
-
There are also meta-search engines which search more than one site at a
time - slower but broader. ie.
Metacrawler.
-
There are also search engines designed specifically for Canada such as
Canada.com,
Maple Square,
Alta
Vista Canada,
-
Also helpful are search engines in French such as
Voila,Toile,
Planet,
Francite
and
Pratique
-
There are picture search engines such as
Picture
search engine
Search Techniques
-
Search sites make a distinction between "natural language" searching [such
as the
Ask Jeeves site where you
can put in any question "Why is the sky blue?" and "boolean operator"
searching
-
Boolean operators are connecting words which add refinement to a search.
The operators include and [+], or, not and several others.
-
For example, it is better to search for beagles and pets, mustang and car,
law and Canada, Lemieux or Gretzky. Unless you have a very specific
term such as aquaculture, cloning, Hitler, consider using Boolean operators
to narrow the search.
-
Another help in searching is the use of quotation marks around phrases,
but be careful. Use quotation marks to search for specific words
that will appear in only 1 order: "The Beatles", "Wilt Chamberlain",
"Toronto Maple Leafs". Do not use quotation marks for words that
may appear in any order: "volcano Mount Saint Helen's" would not
give good search results
-
truncation is using a wildcard * to reduce
a word to its root, truck. ie. adopt* will tell the site to look for adopt,
adopted, adoption...
-
use combinations of the above: "Wayne Gretzky"
and nhl and scor*
|
