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Where to find an answer Sometimes the internet seems so huge and intimidating that it's difficult to find an answer to a seemly simple question. I know that sometimes I will type a question into a search engine and what I get back bears absolutely no relationship to what I wanted to find out. Your average search engine is actually not a great way to get answers. What search engines do is search the entire internet for pages, then add them to a massive series of lists (I'm simplifying this quite a bit). Once they have the lists of pages, they break them down dozens of different ways to try and figure out what they are really about. Once they've done that, they perform some very interesting calculations to determine if the pages are spam - those are thrown away. Then the engines have to rank these pages so that you get "better" matches closer to the top of the list. What you get with search engines is a great place to start looking for an answer - if you can boil the answer down to something usable by the engine. Sometimes you will find a question that works - type "what is the recipe for chicken noodle soup?" and you will get some great responses. Sometimes you will get junk. The problem is that you are (a) depending upon the opinions of a piece of robot software to find what you need, and (b) you will only find things that have been already created and are in the search engine database. What I usually do when I'm doing research is quickly try the major search engines (Google, Altavista, Lycos and Hotbot) to see what they pull up. Then I move to Yahoo, DMOZ (Netscape's directory) and Looksmart. Yahoo, DMOZ, and Looksmart are directories, and the major different between directories and search engines is that directories are created by humans and search engines are put together by robots. I have found that directories tend to be much, much more on target than search engines for many areas of research. Okay, you've checked out the major search engines and the directories - now what? The next step is to find the precise search engines and directories for your subject. You see, there are tens of thousands of these all over the internet. There are directories and search engines for medical data, legal information, technical journals, educational materials, and even adult photos and videos! How do you find these? An excellent place to start is Yahoo's Search Engines and Directories, which is a list of these things. Now what do you do? It's time to move forward to more human editing and writing. There are many sites which include libraries of information created by people just like you and me. These include:
Once you've looked over those sites, you have still more options. You can directly ask experts for an answer! Here are some places to check out:
Another great set of resources is newsgroups, ezines and elists (such as Egroups.Com). If you can find the right newsgroup, ezine or elist then you've got it made. Note that this can be a long and difficult search. Oh yes, if you've got internet related questions, then one of your best resources is:
About the Author Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge. Web Site Address: http://www.internet-tips.net Weekly newsletter: http://www.internet-tips.net/joinlist.htm Daily Tips: mailto:internet-tips@GetResponse.com Claudia Arevalo-Lowe is the webmistress of Internet Tips And Secrets and Surviving Asthma. Visit her site at http://survivingasthma.com List of articles available for reprint: article-list@internet-tips.net All articles published on EthanCote.com are copyrighted by their respective author. They are not to be taken without the consent of the author. |
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