One of the fascinations of the World Wide Web is our ability to access
literally thousands of places which present useful and interesting
information. Actually there are just too many places for any one person
to find all of them.
Fortunately some enterprising souls on the Web have done some
of the searching for the rest of us and have created Web pages with
a great array of such sites. A couple that I have found particularly
useful are:
Good as these guys are there are just too many subjects out there on the
Web for any one guy (or gal) to know. So what do you do when you can't
find what you want on these pages? Fortunately there is help. Starting (I think) with
WebCrawler a number of search engines have been developed that search the Web for pages based on the search
arguments you input to the system and present you with a list of likely sites - including
a link to those sites. Here are some of these search engines which you may find
useful.
This latter is somewhat unique in that it does no searching on its own but accesses a
number of search engines and gives you a consolidated list of the results including some
effort to eliminate duplicate entries of sites found by more than one of the search engines that it uses. Personally this is the search engine that I normally use.
Be aware that you must be careful in formulating your search arguments or you may end up with some rather bizarre results.
One of the most useful aspects of the Internet is the news groups (commonly known as
USENET) with thousands of groups covering virtually any subject you might want to
know something about. Some of you may remember that I did have a link to "The Big List" which permitted access to most of the news groups. Unfortunately the maintainer of the list has not been able to find a permanent home for the list so (so far as I know) it is no longer available. As a replacment I have found a site at the University of North Carolina
which fills the gap left by the demise of the Big List.
Unfortunately, the site has been closed to those without the
necessary permissions which means, I presume, that it is only open
to the students, staff and faculty of the University of North Carolina.
Probably the best site now available for searching for information on
USENET is deja.com
which will search the various USENET sites on the basis of the
search criteria which you specify. Personally while I find the deju
system does search out interesting and informative posts to various
USENET groups it does take some patience to find exactly the best
search arguments.
And if you really feel adventurous and want to surf the net without the
guidance of the search engine gurus of the Web try a little WEB ROULETTE - even I don't
know where you will end up. This little goodie, among many others, comes from Yahoo! - a list of links to
just about everywhere on the Web which you can access from the line above.
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