CLICK & DOUBLE CLICK: SEARCH ENGINES CAN UNLOCK THE INTERNET OR WEAVE STICKY WEB (COLUMN 29)

Cybertip: We're compiling a comprehensive list of our favorite Internet sites for the Resource Room section of SEMissourian.com. Please e-mail your suggestions to clicksemissourian.com

The World Wide Web. It can be a pretty intimidating animal, especially to newcomers.

People ask us all the time: "How do you know where to go?" Unfortunately, there is no definitive roadmap. Some of it's word of mouth. Some of it's just jumping from place to place. A good link often leads to another good link. That's the beauty of the web. Sometimes, you have to be willing to go with the flow.

A good place to start may be the various search engines. Of course, even the search engines themselves can be overwhelming. Type in President Clinton and you may find more than a million choices. No one wants to search all that.

Which search engine is best? Again, there's no clear cut answer. Each surfer probably has his or her favorite. It may be speed, other services, or just plain habit.

Perhaps the best thing about search engines is that they're free. But, as in many things, you get what you pay for.

Peggy: Here my advice on search engines: Don't use them if you don't have to. Type in the logical name first. Such as www.nike.com., or www.census.gov. If that doesn't work, try the search engines. You'll be surprised how often the name really works.

Joni: We tend to start at Yahoo. It's one of the biggest, which can work for or against you.

http://www.yahoo.com

Yahoo is so big that it is broken up into a lot of different services. In addition to general searches, it can hunt down news, stock quotes or even airline prices. One of our colleagues enjoys the "My Yahoo" offering, which is free. It gathers news, sports, stocks and other tidbits that he has specified to his desktop.

Peggy: The best advice in searching is to get as specific as possible. That should narrow down your choices somewhat. If you want a specific phrase, put quote marks around it, complete with spaces and punctuation. Nothing's more annoying that millions of choices. At least Yahoo, gives you categories to narrow it down, and sometimes speed up the search.

Joni: Yahoo is a good example of just how fast the Internet is growing. This search engine added more than 10,000 new sites alone in the last week.

Peggy: Don't forget to check the cool sites of the day on Yahoo. Both Yahoo staffers make their picks along with the surfers. Some options today: Driveways of the Rich and Famous, and Sesame Street Lyrics Archives. That's what's so great about the Internet: the ultimate in diversity.

Joni: After you completed a search on Yahoo, you can bookmark that page with your narrowed-down choices. That's one advantage to Yahoo.

Peggy: Probably, one of the more popular ones on the Internet is Alta Vista, because it offers an advanced search mode. It also searches newsgroups, which Yahoo doesn't.

http://www.altavista.digital.com

Joni: Quote marks are your friend in an Alta Vista search. In advanced searches, use the Results Ranking Criteria box when possible. Each document is graded based on how many of the search terms it contains, where the words are in the document, and how close to each other these terms are.

Peggy: Alta Vista is fast. That's despite the fact that it searches 31 million pages found on 476,000 servers, and 4 million articles from 14,000 Usenet newsgroups. Alta Vista is accessed more than 29 million times each week day. Here's a search tip for Alta Vista. Use an asterisk as a wildcard, if you're not sure about the spelling.

Joni: For those seeking specific kinds of technology on web pages, HotBot may be the search engine for you.

http://www.hotbot.com

Peggy: You can limit the media type in your search to such choices as Java or Shockwave. The search can also be limited by date or location. These changes are simply a click of a button on the main search page.

Joni: Most of the search engines offer FAQs, under the About Us buttons. This can give searchers valuable information about how the search engine works. For example, HotBot's FAQ tells us you can search for an exact phrase if it surrounded by double quotes. The "save my settings" button at the bottom of HotBot can helpful is specific searches. HotBot will also search Usenet groups.

Peggy: Sometimes you feel like a detective, even if you're trying to find something simple on the Internet. In that case, you might want to jump over to Internet Sleuth.

http://www.isleuth.com

Joni: Stumped for a place to search? This site offers you a whopping 1,800 data bases in which to find your answer. An interesting limit under the web search option is time. You can limit the maximum search time from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. How patient are we feeling today, Peggy?

Peggy: About normal: 10 seconds or less. While most search engines index the entire web, this site maintains an index of searchable databases. For example, under a "News" search, they offer the following databases: 14 days of Associated Press headlines, 14 days of the Electronic Newsstand, the NewCentury Network, Newstracker and the Washington Post headlines for the past two weeks.

Joni: Since you're searching databases, you actually enter more broad terms at the start. If you're looking for a Chicken Marsala recipe, you start with the word recipe, since there's no Chicken Marsala data base on the web. Once you find a specific database, then you get specific.

Peggy: If the task of searching databases seems too daunting, you might want to check out the massive search.com site for a real smorgasbord of actual search engines.

http://www.search.com

Joni: This site is maintained by C-Net. It offers a fairly easy way to personalize your searches at the top of the page. If your stumped about which search engine to use, this might be a good place to start since it offers the best, and worst, of all the search engines.

Peggy: What's your favorite search engine? E-mail us at clicksemissourian.com

See you in Cyberspace.

~Joni Adams is managing editor and Peggy Scott is graphics editor at the Southeast Missourian.