If you're anything like me, you've searched for information which you feel pretty sure will be on the net someplace, and failed to find it. Over some years I have developed a few simple tools that help you make a hunt more effective.
Search Engines
There are a great many search engines, but I recommend sticking to the main ones - Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Infospace. You just type in what you're looking for, and off goes the engine to look for documents that best match your search. What words you choose to type are critical in the success of your search.
Search on Answers Not Questions
The internet contains lots of articles on all sorts of different topics, and virtually all of these are written in the form of answers, not questions. If you were searching for information on the British Museum for instance, don't type "when was the British Museum founded?" because that would lead to the engine trying to find an article with that string of words. The right thing to type is "the British Museum was founded in". Any page that starts with these words is bound to be the precursor of a good history article. So, just think of what the ideal page would say, and search for that "the whole story on how to copy vinyl to audio cd" - if that's what you want to know, a web site with those words would be just the ticket, and this search would find it.
Search on a disjointed keyword list
Search engines drive their searches by looking for exact text strings, or by hunting for keywords [see 'how search engines work' - below]. So you can just search on a keyword list - there's no need for it to make gramatical sense, or even for the words to be in the right order. Lets say we want to find the theme tune to the old British Childrens classic TV series, Fireball XL5. Now, we don't just want to know about the programme, we want the tune itself, so its likely to be a .wav or mp3 file. Try out with "mp3 wav xl5 fireball theme tune". Just a keyword list, no sort of grammar going on there.
What to do with the list when the Engine delivers it
The search engine will bring back a list of documents that match - but that's not all there is to it. At the top of the list will be 'paid inclusions'. If you have a company that sells something, you want to be sure to come back high on the list when someone searches for a product like yours. Most of the engines (with the noteable exception of AltaVista) will sell you a ranking for a specific set of words. Say you sell washing machines, and you want to be the number one search on the search string 'best washing machines'. The search engine people will let you have that ranking - for a price. This means that a lot of the top of the list will be commercial sites, and they'll be trying to sell you something. If your searching to buy, that's great, but if you're looking for information, you need to look further down the list.
While I'm talking about looking further down the list
The top 10 is where most people look - but its not always the best place. Say you want small rental accommodation in Spain for a week. Any search you do will bring all the big travel agents to the top of the list. You might want a small family owned and run property. Their web site will never compete with the big boys - but it'll be there, way down on page 5 or 10. There's a row of page numbers at the bottom of the search return page so you can jump straight down to the lower ranked pages.
If At First You Don't Succeed
Try again. Try a new keyword list or anticipated answer, or change search engines.
If you know the number - Dial It
A lot of people are confuse web addresses and searches, because they type actual www.whateversite.com type web addresses into the search engine. No need. This is an exact address, you need to type it into the address bar at the top of your browser (make sure the bar is switched on with View-Toolbars-Address Bar - see pic below). If you know a phone number, don't call the operator and ask to be connected, just dial the number.
Guessing Domain Names
The basic form of web address - www.thing.net is called a domain name. Most people choose a domain name which matches their subject or product, so one simple approach is just guess, and type straight into the address bar. So you might try www.niceplacestostay.co.uk . You never know. Incidentally - I'm just making up web addresses as I type this article - they may or may not really exist. You can also entertain yourself, even if you're not search for anything specific by guessing crazy domain names, just to see if they exist - daftasabrush.com, or menwholooklikekennyrogers.com
How Do Search Engines Work Anyway
Well, if you've read down to here, you know about keywords and paid inclusions, but lets forget about the latter for now.
The first issue is keywords. A lot of website are written in Hyper Text Markup Language - HTML, and so you often see addresses ending in .htm - these are documents written in HTML code. HTML contains a header with information not viewable in a web browser, but search engines can see it. It contains a keyword list - words the author thinks is critical to his work. The engine will check these, count how many times they appear in the article and rank accordingly. But of course its not that simple - lots of other things make for a high ranking site, such as popularity - measured by the number of times the site is visited, and the number of other sites that link to it. The exact way engines rank is a guarded secret, and it seems an almost impossible task. Think how many web sites contain the word 'madonna'. If you search on just that word, the engine will come back with a number one most relevant site (or so it claims) - how does it do that? You won't find out.
You might be wondering how engines find sites to index. Well, they employ automated browsers that crawl the internet checking new sites and following links - these tools are known as web crawlers or spiders. You can get your site on the list of places that the crawler will visit by using the 'submit a site' button on most engines. Getting a visit doesn't gaurantee a listing though - crawlers work to rules about what to index and what not.
Now you've read this, you feel like creating your own web page - right?
Well, you can check out another of my articles on that very subject (as soon as I've written it) - find it back at the Br0wn Box