This is a biweekly column providing an annotated list of web sites that may be of interest to the community. Each column will list sites that belong to a particular category: search engines, art, online newspapers & magazines, health and medicine, history, business and economics, etc. or sites relevant to a particular season, e.g., skiing, gardening. Most sites will be non-commercial. To make it easier to access the sites, each biweekly column will be posted on the Town of Winchester's web site one week after publication so that the sites can be accessed and bookmarked without having to be typed. Previous columns will be archived at the Winchester site, also.
There are over a billion web sites, many with highly useful information and probably many more that are only useful to the site creator and his immediate circle of family and friends - photos of the grandchildren, the pet dog, the family vacation, favorite recipes for cooking possum ...... How can one find that particular nugget of information; separate the wheat from the chaff? The answer is - the search engine.
Everyone has heard of Yahoo! and some of you may be even holding onto its stock. Yahoo! is not a search engine but fundamentally a directory (also now called a portal). Directories maintain lists of web sites compiled by humans and classified by subject category - Arts & Humanities, Business & Economy, Computers & Internet ..... Science, Social Science, Society & Culture, etc. However, to confuse the definition, most directories also have a web searching capability that uses a search engine provided by another company.
For a general search directories are very useful, but if you are looking for specific information, e.g. an author's name, a particular document, a news article, use a search engine. A search engine works by using a software program (called a crawler or spider) to search the entire web looking for as many documents as possible. It then stores the URLs (page addresses) and indexes the keywords and text of each web page it finds. Some of these programs also rank web sites according to link popularity, that is, how many other web sites refer to the particular site. When you enter a keyword or keywords into the search engine's query window and press "go" or "search", the search engine begins to deliver up the addresses of web sites containing the keyword or keywords. Unfortunately, this often results in thousands of pages or even millions being found. If you don't find what you are looking for in the first one or two pages displayed, don't look any further - try other key words. Forget power searching - using Boolean (logical) expressions - just try to be more specific, but not too specific - experiment.
Let me give an example. Suppose you want to get a copy of George Washington's Farewell Address. You enter washington (lower case is fine) into the query box of the Google search engine. Google reports 17,100,000 listings, the first item links to news about the inauguration ceremonies. Not much help. You enter george washington next. This time there are only (!) 1,240,000 listings. However, the third item is a link to the University of Virginia's web site "The Papers of George Washington". You've struck gold. Not only is the full text of the Farewell Address at this site but practically all of Washington's papers. Entering washington farewell, results in 103,000 listings with the first item a direct link to the complete text of the address. In this case, you've found the tree but missed the forest. This example illustrates both the pitfalls of searching and the serendipitous discoveries you can make.
Here is a list of search engines, directories, and links to more information on searching the web.
Google
www.google.com
Very easy to use. Google makes use of link popularity to rank sites and has a huge database of sites. It searches over a billion web pages.
Northern Light
www.northernlight.com
Uses natural language to form the search. A favorite among researchers, it places found documents into folders according to meaningful categories.
HotBot
hotbot.lycos.com
Very good for advanced searching with very specific queries. Also has a directory.
Profusion
www.profusion.com
Profusion is not a single search engine but a metacrawler or metasearch engine. Profusion runs your search on several search engines (Alta Vista, LookSmart, About, Yahoo!, Brittanica, Excite, GO, Lycos, Direct Hit) simultaneously, combines the hits, weeds out overlaps, ranks by relevance, and shows you what engines are being used. You can also select the engines to use.
Yahoo!
www.yahoo.com
Launched in 1994, Yahoo! remains the most popular web directory. It's the largest human-compiled guide to the web with over one million sites categorized with very high quality content. For searching, it supplements its own engine with that of Google.
Yahoo! People Search
people.yahoo.com
A specialized search engine. Looking for a former classmate? A long, lost relative? This site provides a telephone number, address, and a map.
Lists of Search Engines from Search Engine Watch
www.searchenginewatch.com/links/
Find all the major search engines; meta search engines; MP3 search engines; kid-safe services and much more.
Web Searching Tips from Search Engine Watch
www.searchenginewatch.com/facts/
Tips on using search engines, comprehensive lists and links to various types of search engines, reviews, Boolean searching, glossary of terms, and more.
Search Engines and Guides to Searching
www.winchestermass.org/links.html#search
A list of popular sites and information on searching from the Winchester home page.
Minuteman Library Guide
www.winchestermass.org/netsearch.html
General information on searching.
The Winchester Public Library holds drop-in demonstrations of internet searching in the Reference Room on Thursdays at 1 pm and 7 pm. No registration is necessary.
This column can be found on the web at www.townonline.com/northwest/winchester. The next column will feature medical and health sites. Previous columns with live links can be found at www.winchestermass.org/wstar.
Martin Zombeck is the Web Master for the Town of Winchester web site (www.winchestermass.org).
