The Internet and the World Wide Web provides ways to access tens of millions of documents, from the full-text versions of Shakespeare's plays to a 10-year-old's holiday tips.
The greatest challenge still remains: finding what you want or need in cyberspace.
Just as there is no central authority running the Internet, there is no central directory for every Internet site, Web page and newsgroup posting.
There are directories and search engines to help you. But as you enter what has become the great global scavenger hunt, there are several things to remember:
- Not everything is listed. Many of the search tools available rely upon individuals to enter their own descriptive information into the search tool's database. A Web author may choose not to list a page or not know the process for listing their site, so you may miss what you're looking for.
- The information you want may be on the Internet, but if the search engine you are using doesn't index it, you won't find it. For example, many government and military sites are not indexed by search engines.
- The listing may be limited to key words. Some search engines send virtual robots out to find a match for the word you submit. Other search engines rely upon the person listing the site to provide key words to match the user's request. This could mean that you search for a key word that doesn't happen to be on that list. Or equally frustrating, the key word may have multiple meanings. For example, if you search for Web sites about the environment, most of the first matches will be for the Unix computer system, which is called the Unix Operating Environment.
- The site may not be in English. As the World Wide Web spreads throughout the physical world, more sites appear in various languages and alternative alphabets or pictograms. Both Google and AltaVista allows searching sites by language and provides translations of some foreign language sites. However, your computer or the search tools may not support a search in Hebrew or Japanese without special software. You may not know what words to search for in another language.
- Not everything is on the Internet. Some days it seems like most of human history has been put online. The realityis that vast repositories of information still remain in libraries, businesses and private homes.
- Information protected by copyright laws may or may not appear online ? or if it does, it may be an illegal pirated version.
- Searches are no longer only text-based. Although the Web can be used to access audio, video, images and other file formats, most search engines only match words. A picture or sound may be discovered, but only if the words describing it match the user's query.
There are two distinct ways of finding information on the Web: directories (sometimes called catalogs) and search engines.
Directories are the yellow pages of the Internet. The first major directory was Yahoo, developed by two Stanford engineering students. Yahoo, like most directories, is arranged by categories that become increasingly specialized. For example, if you were looking for the Web page for a baseball team in the Daytona Beach area, you would click:
- Regional
- U.S. States
- Florida
- Cities
- D for Daytona Beach
- Daytona Beach
- Recreation and Sports
- Baseball
- Daytona Cubs
The search also reveals sites for Bethune-Cookman College and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, but not the top-rated listing for the Stetson University Hatters.
Why? The Hatters are located at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., about 25 miles away.
The missing listing points to the weakness of many searches and directory listings. If the searcher is not familiar with geographical searches, valuable information may be overlooked.
Other directories were quickly developed. As the new directories grew, so did the frustration of going down level by level to find a site. This lead to incorporating search engines within directories to assist in finding information quickly. Some of the directories also allow you to search beyond their own directory listings.
Search engines fall into two general categories. The earliest version searched databases of information submitted by the developer of a given site. These search engines usually used the titles of Web documents to find a match.
Information which had not been submitted to the directory or was contained deep within a document would not be retrieved. For instance, the London Symphony's summer home Web site once contained several screens with information about James dePriest, the conductor at that time. The site was submitted to search engines with his name as one of the key words. The intent was that those screens would be returned to someone who asked a search engine about his name. However, engines which only searched the title of the page or the first page of the site would return the message that no matches were found.
To solve this problem, search engines such as Google began to search every page of every document on the Web, including threads from newsgroups. Searches may now yield an overwhelming number of references, sometimes including multiple references to the same site. Some search engines do return references ranked by how relevant they think the information is, but we've often found a low degree of accuracy in such rankings.
The user needs to learn more advanced searching techniques included in the search engines to avoid receiving messages such as "128,000 references to the word association have been returned." Each search engine includes an advanced search function. Users can click on that link to narrow down their search for the most relevant information for their needs.
