4.1.2 RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET

Looking for specific information among the thousands of documents on the Web can be overwhelming unless you have a search strategy. (It will also help to have a few hints and tips and to know a few good secrets.) Four basic ways to find information on the Web are:

Use starting point documents;
search by content using subject trees and search engines;
search by geographic location of Web sites; and
use Web guides.

Starting Points Pages

A starting points page is usually designed with the information-searching needs of a Web beginner in mind, providing interesting and useful URLS to explore. It doesn't try to list every available resource on a subject, but, instead, provides a few entry points for the beginning of your exploration. The following sites have pages that are good starting points:

100 Hot Spots contains the 100 top Web sites.

What's New maintains a list of new Web sites.

NCSA'S Starting Points for Internet Exploration contains hyperlinks to many common Internet-based information resources.

Content-Oriented Search

A content-oriented search is useful for identify links to sites containing information about a specific topic. A content-oriented search can be conducted using a subject tree or a search engine.

A subject tree is an alphabetically-organized list of Web resources, usually organized with major headings leading to subtopics leading to hyperlinks. A subject tree is similar to a library subject card catalog, but many have the disadvantage of not being comprehensive and not conforming to established library subject classification. Some of the more comprehensive subject trees are:

The WWW Virtual Library is a distributed subject catalog whose different subjects are maintained by people at many sites.

EINet GALAXY was developed by the Enterprise Integration Network (EINet), a division of Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation.

Yahoo offers the feature of building your own personalized subject tree.

Programs, called robots, spiders, or wanderers, "crawl" the Web, look for new URLs and add them to a database. The database can then be searched using a search engine.

The following are tips for conducting a successful search:

Understand the limitation of the search engine. Some search engines search only the titles of documents for search words; others search part of the document's text; others search just the URL text.
Start with a fairly specific list of search words in the text box. Type the most important word first because some search engines give greater weight to the first word in the query. Some search engines provide special search operators (or search options) which help to confine the search to relevant documents. Check your spelling and don't worry about capitalization. If your search retrieves too many documents, narrow the search by typing more search words. Reduce the number of search words if the search retrieves too few documents. Do not use commonly occurring articles (i.e., and, the, a, an) or Web terms (i.e., http) among your search words.
View the list of retrieved documents. In most lists the first document will be the one having the highest match score indicating the most frequent usage of your search words.

You will notice that many search engines also contain subject trees. Findspot gives information and tips on how to conduct searches in several of the following Search Engines:

Here are a few other sites that contain many different search engines:

Netscape provides easy access to several good search engines (Infoseek, Lycos, and WebCrawler) and to lists of search engines (CUI W3 and CUSI) with its Net Search button.

Geographic-Oriented Search

A geographic-oriented search works well when looking for sites in a specific geographic area. Map or directory resources can be used to find Web sites based on location.

Directory Services is a collection of directory servers organized by geographic location.
The Virtual Tourist is a geographic directory of Web servers in the world.
City.Net contains extensive information about countries, states, and regions.

Guide-Oriented Search

Guide-oriented searches are especially helpful for finding large collections of subject-related links and often suggest new and unusual Web pages.

When Things Go Wrong

What to do when :

Your search produces no results.
- Make sure your spelling is right.
- If you use logical operators (Boolean operators), check your syntax.
- Try to be less specific in your query.
- Try another search engine.
Your search produces too many results.
- Try to be more specific.
- Identify common words that are important to your search.
- Try to think of words that uniquely identify what you're looking for.
You're having problems with the server.
- The server might return an error message (or simply not allow any connection) if it's too busy or temporarily down.
No answer, Timed out, Too busy
- Try again after a couple of minutes.
- Wait until a less busier time of the day.
- Avoid prime time hours.
- Try a mirror site (if any).
Error 404, Page/File not found
There's many reasons for this to happen. It may be that the link no longer exists, the URL has been changed or is simply not valid. Check the following and try again:
- Double check your URL, make sure it's entered correctly.
  Check the lower/upper case of each character.
- Check for any non-alphanumeric symbols, make sure they are correct.
- If your URL has more than one directory level, try to move up in the tree remove the last level and try again). Do so until you are at the top level.
Permission denied.
It may be that the site is denying public access or is configured so that only restricted access is allowed. Try again later. Sometimes the restricted access is only for certain period of the day.

Accessing Other Internet Resources

Although the number of Web documents is increasing at a very fast rate, they only comprise a part of publicly-accessible files on the Internet. In the past, several different tools (i.e.,FTP, Gopher, WAIS) were used to access these non-Web resources, but today graphical browsers can access them directly or indirectly with gateways. A gateway is a Web page that serves as an intermediary between Web browsers and Internet resources that aren't directly accessible to the Web.

You can access each of the following with a graphical browser:

FTP File Archives - FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It can be employed to transfer programs (upload or download) between Internet computers. If a Net computer can be accessed using ftp, it is known as a ftp site. To access a ftp site, use a URL that begins with ftp://. See CUinfo List of FTP Sites for links to many FTP sites.

Gopher - Gopher sites are databases of information organized into easy to navigate menu systems. To access a gopher site, use a URL that begins with gopher://, such as gopher://riceinfo.rice.edu:70/11/Subject. You may see a list of Veronica or Jughead servers at the top of your Gopher menu. Veronica is a search engine designed to find resources in Gopherspace; it scans an index of titles of Gopher directories and files for the search word entered. Jughead is essentially the same, except that it searches directory titles only.

WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) - WAIS is a resource discovery tool designed for retrieving documents from full-text databases. You can access WAIS databases through a gateway to a specific WAIS database, or through a gateway to the WAIS Directory of Servers. When conducting a search, WAIS searches the entire content of documents found in its database. It does not employ the Boolean operators (and, or, and not). One example of a gateway is the WAIS Gateway.

Summary

Each of these methods has a particular advantage, although, they are often more effective when used in combination. Use the following integrated strategies or guidelines to minimize search time and maximize search results:

search broadly to determine the breath of information available on a subject;
look for pages with collections of links to the subject;
locate sites related to the subject; and,
navigate all the links you find to identify additional resources on the subject.

EXERCISES

1. Access the sites listed under Starting Points, Content-Oriented Searches, Geographic-Oriented Searches, and Guide-Oriented Searches. Write an evaluation of at least one site from each category including its organization, content, and under what conditions you think you might use the site.

2. Compare and contrast the use of at least two different search engines (number of hits, ease of use, type of documents obtained) by entering the same search words in both.

3. Conduct a search on a search engine, describing the search words you initially entered and the process you went through (adding more search words, using special search operators, etc.) to find documents which accurately describe your topic.