One of the biggest challenges in using the World Wide Web as a tool is that it's often very difficult to find information. This isn't surprising, really. Two problems confront web site visitors: the staggering volume of the information available and the varying quality and reliability of the information. Tens of thousands of web sites exist, supplying millions of pages of information. And if you sift through even a few dozen pages, you'll encounter voluminous quantities of advertising, sloppily prepared and hastily presented information, and much suspect data.
You can use search engines to deal with the quantity of information problem and you can sometimes even use them to help filter out some of the poor quality web pages. Search engines attempt to organize and bring structures to the Internet's—and in particular to the web's—vast resources.
Click the Search button in Internet Explorer to display the Search bar, as shown in Figure 23-7. You can use the Search bar’s default search engine by entering a search phrase or browsing through the search engine’s categories. If you click the down arrow on the right side of the Search button and choose the On The Internet command, Internet Explorer displays a different search engine page in the Search bar. If you click the down arrow on the right side of the Search button and choose the List Of All Search Engines command, Internet Explorer displays a list of search engines in the main pane to the right of the Search bar. To remove the Search bar, click the Search button again.
You shouldn’t feel obligated to use the default search engine that Internet Explorer displays first in the Search bar. Once you find a search engine that suits your needs, you can go immediately to that engine’s web page by entering its URL in the Address box or by adding the search engine’s home page to your list of favorites.
Search engines work in different ways. Some use computers to index millions of web pages based on hyperlinks. Others use human resources to sort through and categorize web pages. You usually have two ways of searching the Internet:
· If you’re looking for something specific, it usually works best to supply a term or phrase to the search engine, as shown in Figure 23-8. For example, let’s say you are interested in taking a train to the Indian mountain town of Darjeeling. You might enter the words Darjeeling and train in the search engine’s text box as shown below. When you press Enter, the search engine then looks up the term or phrase in its index and supplies the first portion of a list (usually a lengthy list) of web pages that contain that term. You can go to a web page by clicking its hyperlink from the list.
NOTE: Different search engines work differently, but, in general, if you enter more than one word, enclose the words in quotations if you want the search engine to treat the words as a phrase. For example, if you wanted to search for web pages that used the phrase “St. Augustine,” you would enclose this entry in quotation marks.
· If you’re looking for general information on a topic, you can browse through the search engine’s categories and subcategories, as shown in Figure 23-9. For example, if you want to learn more about the province of Alberta in Canada, you could click the Countries subcategory under the Regional category. Then you could go through the categories clicking Canada, Provinces and Territories, and Alberta. Each time you click a subcategory, the search engine displays a new page listing the information subcategories within the selected category.
Search engines, as you'll find as soon as you begin using them, aren't perfect. Certainly, they make it much easier to find information on the Internet, but they won't always help you find the information you need or want. For this reason, don't rely solely on search engines. If you stumble upon some interesting web site while browsing, for example, add it to your Favorites folder, which is discussed in the following section. If you hear about or see the URL for an interesting web site, write it down someplace so you can later try it. What's more, do consider learning to use more than one search engine. Resources that don't appear in one search engine often do appear in another. Some search engines index more web sites, and therefore work better for finding specific or obscure information.
A few minutes of time spent learning about Yahoo! or AltaVista in depth, for example, will deliver tremendous time savings over the course of year.