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How to find a needle of data in the Internet haystack
Garrett Wasny, CMC | January, 2001It’s Friday afternoon, 4:29 pm. You have an urgent report due at 5:00 pm. To complete the assignment, you need one simple statistic: the current population of Texas. That shouldn’t be too difficult to find online, you say to yourself, and fire up your web browser. You go to AltaVista at http://www.altavista.com – one of the web’s leading search engines. You type in “current Texas population” and press the “search” button. After a moment, the screen refreshes and notes that it has found 192,012 pages related to your search query. Wow, you think. That’s a whole lot of pages, but all you want is one basic stat from one reputable website. Surely, it has to be here, somewhere, and no doubt it’s right at the top of the list.
You point your cursor down and scan through the leading 10 listings. In bold, blue hyper-link type is the number one ranked site: “Advertiser index for homepage.” Huh? Advertiser index? You read further. Underneath the heading it reads “Homepage of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.” Now, you get it. The webpage is for a Texas newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. You see the connection – Fort Worth is in Texas, and you want the population of Texas – but, clearly, this is not a match. Number two is “Sally’s Place for Food, Wine, and Travel.” You chuckle at that one. Not even close. Number three is “National Council for Science and the Environment.” What? How did this come up, and so high up in the rankings to boot? Sorry. Number four is “Real Estate Center.” On a whim, you click on the link, and see that the page provides news on Texas metro real estate. Nice, but not what you’re seeking. You hit the back button, and return to the web page results page. Number five is – what? – “Advertiser index for homepage.” The same as number one. Again? Oh, please.
You shake your head, and point your browser to Excite at http://www.excite.com, and then Go at http://www.go.com and after that Webcrawler at http://www.webcrawler.com – all leading web search tools. Unfortunately, your luck at these sites is not much better. By now, you’re hyperventilating in frustration. You’ve clicked and scrolled away 30 minutes of precious time, and still have nothing to show for it. That one tiny e-nugget – a seemingly no-brainer population stat on a major U.S. state – has eluded you. With trembling hands and a heavy heart, you phone your boss, and inform her your report will be late. She goes ballistic, and reduces you to a convulsing, sobbing, scrambled heap of white collar angst.
Who says Internet research isn’t fun?
Welcome to online information retrieval in the 21st century. Here, patience and persistence aren’t virtues. They’re standard operating procedures. Seeking anything on the web – even the most basic fact – is often a tortuous e-paper-chasing, bloodhound-sniffing, scavenger-hunting, forensic-investigating, Sherlock Holmes-with-a-magnifying-glass, Florida-recount show-stopping production.
Just how bad is the searching problem? According to Business 2.0, between 60 and 80 percent of people searching for information on the web routinely fail to find what they’re looking for. A key reason is that the web is unbelievably huge – between three and four billion pages by some estimates – and growing by some six million webpages a day, every day. The web is so enormous that even the best search engines – and all the attitude-by-the-gallon, cafe-latte-sipping, techno-jocks who program them – cannot keep up. By many accounts, search engines cover only a 10% share of the web. The other 90%? Forget it. Unless you know the exact URL, it’s about as accessible as Neptune on horseback. Even if you could find it, the site likely wouldn’t be of much use anyways. All too many pages are out of date and contain questionable content, if any content at all. Countless other pages are simply e-debris -- broken links which connect to nothing.
What’s a surfer to do? With so little of the web indexed and so much of the Internet littered with useless clutter, how can one use the Internet to conduct serious business research? Based on over five years of web-surfing experience, here are nine things I do to cut through all the e-flotsam, and quickly zero in on those websites and webpages that contain the exact information I need.
Search offline. I get asked all the time “how are you able to surf the web and find all those great information-packed sites so quickly?” My response: I don’t. I do most of my e-searching off the web, not on it. Whenever I pass a newsstand or a bookstore or I’m just sitting in a waiting room, I always make a point of scanning the available magazines, particularly trade publications which focus on a specific industry such as woodworking or aerospace or insurance. I’m constantly hunting for cover stories such as “Top 50 Websites in Our Industry” and “Best 100 Websites” and similar titles. These “best of” lists have been compiled by web-savvy writers and editors who monitor, for a living, the latest online developments in a particular industry. Such articles lead me instantly to the top web resources in a given category, and save me the time and trouble of doing it myself. For even the most seasoned Internet user, scouring the Internet for information can be a totally frustrating experience, and doing even a minimum of offline research will do much to greatly enhance your online productivity.
Know and use ALL the leading search engines and directories. Test drive
all the leading search tools online. These include AOL Search at http://search.aol.com/, AltaVista at http://www.altavista.com, Ask Jeeves at http://www.askjeeves.com, DirectHit at http://www.directhit.com, Excite at http://www.excite.com, Fast-Search
at http://www.alltheweb.com/, Go at http://www.go.com/, GoTo at
http://www.goto.com/, Google at http://www.google.com, HotBot at
http://www.hotbot.com, iWon at http://www.iwon.com/, LookSmart at
http://www.looksmart.com, Lycos at http://www.lycos.com, MSN Search at
http://search.msn.com, Northern Light at http://www.northernlight.com,
RagingSeach at http://www.ragingsearch.altavista.com/, Snap at http://www.snap.com, Webcrawler at http://www.webcrawler.com, and Yahoo
at http://www.yahoo.com. A lot of people I know just use Yahoo for searching, and that’s it. Using this Yahoo-only strategy is like starting Shaquille O’Neal – and him alone – in a pro basketball game with no teammates and no substitutes. As good as he is, there’s no way he can take on an entire team by himself. Impossible. So too with search engines. Relying on one or even two or three search tools to cover the whole Internet is not nearly as effective as using a “team” of search engines – at least the 20 listed here – to sweep farther and deeper online. Each has different subject specialties, coverage areas, and classification systems, and each will produce different results for the same keywords. For more information on the leading search tools,
and the strengths and weaknesses of each, check out Search Engine Watch at http://www.searchenginewatch.com, a widely-read and respected search engine e-zine.Read the manuals. This is a cliche tip that nobody wants to hear and almost no one ever follows but it bears repeating: read the freaking manuals. From interpreting results to refining searches to personalizing your display, each search tool is slightly different, and you need to familiarize yourself with all its features and functions to fully tap its true web scanning power. You won’t learn this by half-heartedly clicking through the site. You need to take the time to carefully review the search tips, help, and frequently asked questions sections of the site which explain, in plain, simple language, how to make the most of the resource.
Use double quotes for phrases. I’m totally amazed more people aren’t aware of this no-brainer searching technique, but it can make a world of difference in your online scanning. Whenever you input a phrase -- say, cell phone or any other group of two or more related words – into a search engine window, put that phrase in quotation marks. In this case, you’d type “cell phone” with the quotation marks. This instructs the search engine to look for that specific phrase, not merely the individual words. Without the quotes, the engines will retrieve pages that contain any of the search words, even if they’re in different paragraphs. With the quotes, the engines look for that specific phrase, and perform a more accurate search. Simple, yet surprisingly effective.
Use the plus sign (+). Use the + sign to instruct a search engine to find webpages that contain all the words you enter, not just some of them. Example: say you were looking for information on free PowerPoint templates. In the search engine window, type +free +PowerPoint +templates. This tells the engine to list only those webpages that include all three words. The + symbol is especially useful when search engines swamp you with links on a given search topic. To narrow down the results, simply add the + sign in front of the keywords you’re seeking. With each + sign and keyword you add – and feel free to add as many as you like in a long string of + signs and keywords -- you enhance the precision of your search, and increase the chances of tracking down what you seek online.
Use subject indexes. Subject indexes are directories of websites which have been compiled manually, by hand, by good old fashioned carbon-based life forms (i.e., human beings, remember them?), as opposed to automated software programs. The leading web indexes include About at http://www.about.com, the Open Directory Project at http://dmoz.org/,
and the World Wide Web Virtual Library at http://vlib.org/. Using an army of volunteer editors, these indexes get experts from a particular industry or topic – say, international business and trade – to review the leading websites online in that category. The experts organize the e-information, and write brief reviews of the best web resources. Far less busy and commercial than the regular search engines, subject indexes are perfect for those who prefer a more human touch when searching for information on the web.Use specialty search tools. An underrated and often overlooked resource for online scanning is specialty search tools: e-directories which spotlight a specific subject, geographic area, or industry. Examples abound. Health A to Z at http://www.healthatoz.com/ is an index of some
50,000 online resources on health and medicine. Euroseek at http://www.euroseek.com links to some 1.5 million European websites. The American Export Register at http://www.aernet.com/ is an e-database of over 45,000 American companies doing business around the world. Typically administered by experts in their field, the sites are highly focused and provide a mile-deep, inch-wide slice of the web, whereas the regular, more popular search engines deliver a more general inch-deep, mile-wide sweep of cyberspace. Visit Beaucoup at http://www.beaucoup.com for a directory of leading specialty search tools online.Use virtual search assistants. Too busy to search the web? Virtual search assistants - automated web scanning tools -- will search the web for you, even when you're not at your computer. An example is the Informant at http://informant.dartmouth.edu/, a no-charge e-search robot that you may program to make regular sweeps of the Internet, and look for keywords you specify. The e-tool will also send you e-mail alerts when webpages of your choosing are updated, or new sites appear. Another electronic search helper is Copernic at http://www.copernic.com/. Available in six languages, Copernic scans the leading search engines for you, and brings back filtered results.
Use virtual clipping services. Looking for breaking news on a particular person, place, organization or thing? A number of e-tools are dedicated to exclusively tracking news sites on the web. These include Excite Newstracker at http://nt.excite.com/, Newstrawler at http://www.newstrawler.com/, and Yahoo Alerts at http://alerts.yahoo.com/. These resources are ideal for businesspeople who wish to monitor online reporting of their own company or other businesses of interest, and track developments on issues ranging from technology to health.
Garrett Wasny is an e-commerce author and trainer in Vancouver, Canada.
Web: http://www.howtoconquertheworld.com.
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