Search and you will find

The World Wide Web is huge, but thankfully there are ways of keeping your sanity while searching

We often hear of the term "Information Overload", or, as Kishore Bhargava likes to say, "Informing yourself to death".

One of the most frustrating exercises these days is finding something useful on the World Wide Web. Not because there is so little, but because there is just too much. And not all of it is very useful.

We have heard stories of people who say that the Internet is a waste of time - these are probably people who blindly dive in, aimlessly floundering around this ocean of information, rarely finding what they are looking for.

Just like the game of chess or MineSweeper (a vastly underrated game that comes with Windows 3.x and Windows 95), searching for information requires both strategy and a reasonable amount of logic. Just as wildly stabbing at squares in MineSweeper very quickly gets you killed, blindly "surfing the Web" gets you about as much useful information as watching Doordarshan News.

Thankfully, there are several easily applied methods you can use to quickly find what you are looking for. They can broadly be classified into three headings: Strategy, Search Logic and Shopping List.

Strategy

Probably the first thing you should do is carefully note down just what you are looking for. This simple step is probably the most commonly skipped one. Too many people just dive in and start hunting, knowing only vaguely what they are looking for.

Sit down and carefully examine the objective:

a. Is the information you are looking for about a specific product?

If the answer is yes, then there is a good chance that you will find this information on the product manufacturer's web site - that is, if the manufacturer has a web site. Most reputed companies do, so it is highly likely that going to WWW.COMPANYNAME.COM (where "Companyname" is naturally the name of the manufacturer) will immediately get you on the right track. For example, if you are looking for information about a Microsoft product, then www.microsoft.com is a very good place to start.

However, the manufacturer's site may not be the best place to get the information you are seeking. Often, popular products are supported on third-party sites. For example, the best Windows 95 support site is www.windows95.com - an independent site that houses excellent information about Windows 95.

How do you find such third-party sites? Often, the manufacturer will have a list of related sites (that support their product) available on their web servers. After all, it is in their own best interests to do so.

If neither of these two approaches gets you anywhere, then you can try plan B:

b.Are you looking for more generic information?

In this case, you will have to make use of Search Engines - Web sites that are specifically meant to help you find things, based on parameters you supply.

Some of these sites are more Index Based - i.e., you get a list of indices, from which you select the item that best fits what you are looking for. This leads you to other indices, which get more and more specific until you find a list of information that is exactly (or very close to) what you are looking for. The most popular of such Index Based sites is www.yahoo.com - definitely the best place to start any search.

Other search engines are Keyword Based - you specify a few keywords that collectively describe what you are looking for, and the engines will kick out a list of addresses that seem to match your requirements. Some of these search engines are www.altavista.digital.com and www.lycos.com. Of these, www.altavista.digital.com seems to be the most comprehensive one, but these things change on a daily basis.

The third kind of search engine is the Concept Based one - here, you describe a concept rather than supply keywords, and the search engine will dig out not only addresses that matych the terms you have supplied directly, but will also show you addresses that may be related to the subject. A good example of such a site is www.excite.com - its lets you do both keyword and concept based searches.

Finally, you have the Gateway Based search engines. These aren't search engines at all - they are just front ends to other search engines. A good example of this is www.search.com.

Search Logic

OK, now that we know where to search, let's focus on the how to search.

Here is a classic mistake people make while searching for information:

You are looking for information about fashion. So what do you do? You go to www.altavista.digital.com, and, in the keywords field, enter the word fashion and click on the Search button.

Seconds later, AltaVista returns with some 60,000 descriptions and addresses.

Happy? Initially, yes. But then you begin to realise that these 60,000 "hits" (as they are known) are almost completely useless to you - there are just too many, and not all of them point to information that is useful to you. In fact, almost all of them are useless!

Does the above example look familiar? Some people, after experiencing this, go back to traditional ways of searching for information, expounding the theory that the World Wide Web is useless.

But what exactly went wrong over here? Is the web really useless? Or is it really the fault of your search method that is to blame?

Sit back for a moment, and consider what you are really looking for. Were you really looking for every reference there is about fashion, or were you looking for something more specific, such as "Men's Fashion"? Then why not say so?

So go ahead, and revise the search. This time enter men's fashion instead of just fashion. Quickly, AltaVista returns a much smaller list. Happy now?

No? You checked some of these links, and found that they either contain "men's" or "fashion", but very few contain are really about men's fashion!

Well, you just discovered that AltaVista has treated your search parameters as separate words. It has located all pages that have the word "men's" and "fashion" in them, but necessarily together or in context.

What you need to do is tell the search engine that you are looking for the term "men's fashion", not the individual words. You do this by enclosing the term or phrase in quotation marks, like this :

"men's fashion"

Another pointer - always enter search terms completely in lower case. The search engine will take this as a instruction to search irrespective of case. If you use capitalisation, the search engine will find only those words that are capitalised exactly as you have specified.

Now see what AltaVista returns - pure gold! Virtually every link displayed is relevant to your query, and you quickly find what you are looking for. Many of the links you now investigate also have links to other pages, which seem interesting, and you are tempted to follow them to see what is there….

Its time for the Shopping List

Shopping List

When you are searching for information on the web, you are likely to get distracted very fast, which leads to extended "web surfing" sessions which become less and less productive, though wildly entertaining.

This is OK if you are doing this in your spare time, and have nothing better to do. But if you are searching for business related information that needs to be applied once you find it, things are different. Your employers (or even you yourself) aren't going to be too happy if you spend enormous amounts of time online. After all, the web is supposed to be a tool, not an end in itself! The first few minutes of searching can be highly productive, but as time goes by, the productiveness begins to sink as you start following links that have little to do with your original quest.

That is why you should write down very clearly just what you are looking for - do this even before you go online. And once you have found it, put a tick mark against your list of objectives. Once every item is ticked, disconnect!

This is not a new concept. People have used this principle very effectively for ages! If you go out shopping (especially in one of these new "have-it-all" supermarkets) without a clear shopping list, you might end up "browsing the shelves", picking up things that might interest you. In no time at all, you'll have spent more money (or, in the case of the web, time) than you had originally planned to. This can have devastating effects on your household budget. Or your employer's confidence in the web being useful.

For example, let's say that your objective was to find a list of 20 fashion houses abroad dealing with men's fashion. You want to contact them in order to explore the possibility of selling your fashion products to them. In order to contact them, you need to know who they are, and what their e-mail addresses are.

So your "shopping list" might look something like this:

1. locate 20 fashion houses dealing with men's fashion

2. get their e-mail addresses and other contact information

Now, as you accomplish each objective, put a tick mark against each point on the shopping list. Once all of them are ticked, note down the results and disconnect.

Follow this often enough, and you'll find that the web suddenly appears as a cost and time effective tool that you and your employers will never have to criticise as being a waste of time.

Winding down

That's it for this month. As always, I request you to keep your comments and queries flowing in. I cannot promise that I will reply to all of them, but they will help shape this column into what you want it to be.

Cheerio!

Sidebar: Accessing Search Engines

There are two ways by which you can access search engines:

  1. If you have a Shell account, select the Lynx option. When the screen has settled down, press "g" and at the prompt, enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator) or the search engine, e.g. http://www.altavista.digital.com
  2. If you have a TCP/IP account, fire up your World Wide Web browser (such as Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.), and type the URL into the Location field.

Rather than giving you a long list of search engines that you can access, I will point you to C|Net's www.search.com, which is a front end for most of the popular search engines. Remember that not every search engine yields the same results - experiment a bit until you find one that suits your purposes. Some search engines are more specific in content than others. WWW.SEARCH.COM has a list of such specific engines available, too, so it might make sense to use those rather than some generic engine.