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Mykes' Search Tips People have seen me post on the community boards at C-SPAN Community message boards, and have asked me where I get my factual information. The answer is off the web, of course, though I have my own private WWW intranet site where I save a lot of information I find useful on a regular basis. I offer these tips to people who are looking for sources of specific information. First, I mainly use Yahoo! as my search engine. Yahoo! itself is just decent at finding things, but when it uses the Google search engine to find content inside WWW pages, it is terrific. Second, I less frequently use Ask Jeeves when I have a query that my Yahoo! searches don't do well on. Ask Jeeves used to be very good at finding answers, but I now find it often shows me results that are uselss. When you go to Yahoo!, you can type "something" into the search box. Just what that "something" is is the key to successful searches. The first thing to know is that you can enter multiple words and precede those words with a plus sign. If you enter just one word, like Clinton, the search results may give you a million pages, because it will find Roger Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and any other WWW page with the name Clinton in it. You can enter two words, like Bill Clinton, as well. But this is going to be EVEN WORSE than searching for just Clinton because it's really searching for any WWW page with either Bill or Clinton on it. Not a good idea. Here's where those plus signs come in. If you enter +Bill +Clinton, it refines the search results so the WWW pages must contain both Bill and Clinton. You just "weeded out" all those pages with Roger and Hillary (etc.) on them. This is not exactly true, as there may be pages with Bill and/or Hillary and/or Roger on them, but you have just eliminated all kinds of WWW pages you really didn't care about. When you get your results, you are first shown contents from the Yahoo! directory. Sometimes those are useful, but most often not. After viewing the pages of those results, there is eventually a link at the bottom of the page that says "Web Page Matches >" and that's where the searches get to the nitty gritty. At the bottom of the pages of Yahoo! directory, there's also a link that says "Search in other search engines: Google" that you can click on to get to the WWW page matches right away. Keep this in mind: the Yahoo! directory is of WWW sites. The Google search results are of individual WWW pages; many of those results can be from a single WWW site. Now that you are looking at WWW page matches, you still might find far too many WWW pages to look at to find what you're looking for. It's relatively easy to continue to refine your search at this point. At the top and bottom of the page is a text box with your current search in it. You can add more words (don't forget to precede these with plus sign too) to eliminate pages you don't care about. For example, change +Bill +Clinton to +Bill +Clinton +Impeachment and all those pages about Clinton's foreign policy go away. You can continue to refine your search by adding words, as described. At some point, you may add a word that returns NO results at all. Use the "Back" button on your browser to go back one page and try a different word. At some point, you're going to refine the search as far as you can and there's going to be some results you will have to go through by hand. This is not a bad thing. The search engine shows you the text on the WWW page that matches your search criteria and that should give you a good clue about whether the link to that page is one you should click on. Use the RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON over the WWW page links to bring up a pop-up menu. On the menu is an item that says "Open in New Window." Always do that to open the WWW page in a new browser window. This way, you won't lose track of where you were in your search results. Frequently, you'll find the page you open is useless, just close that browser window and continue with the search results page in the previous window. Pay attention to the URL of the WWW page you are about to open. If it's some geocities site, the content of the WWW page is suspect. Anyone can make a WWW page on geocities and put up information that is not trustworthy. If you post information from such a page to the C-SPAN community board, or send it to some mailing list you belong to, or whatever, you are basically asking the recipient/reader to do a bunch of work to verify the so-called facts or claims in that information. There's more to the URL of the WWW page you're about to open. It could easily be from a trusted source, like a newspaper or well-known organization. But if the organization is branded a right-wing-conspiracy member or a "world socialist" one, then people with views opposite to yours will take the source of the information as suspect. If you want to make a point to a conservative/right-winger, content from the Washington Times will get their attention before content from the Washington Post will. You get the picture. The government has huge amounts of publicly available information on a wide range of sites. If you use one of those sites as a source, the information is likely to be as sound as any you will find anywhere. I would look to those kinds of sites for statistics or other information before any others. ALWAYS give a source for your information. If you make a statement like, "Ralph Nader donates 80% of his income to charity," then people are going to want to see references to his income tax return; if you show a number, like $1M in income and $800K in charitable deductions, the 80% figure is meaningful. Otherwise, the 80% figure is just a number you pulled out of thin air, and nobody has a reason to believe what you say. ALWAYS post a link to your source, even if you quote the whole thing. You can click on the Address textbox in your browser to select the URL. On Windows, hit Ctrl+C to copy it. Then paste it into the edit text box window on the C-SPAN Community site, using Ctrl+V. Note: you can paste the URL into almost any Windows application where text can be typed. The source gives you credability, and even if people don't beleive you, they can check the source of your fact for accuracy. Occaisionally, there is a WWW page you find that is of tremendous value. You might want to use it today, tomorrow, or further down the road. For this, you can use your browser's "Favorites" function to have the browser permanently save a bookmark to the WWW page. Your favorites can be organized into categories, etc. I leave that up to you to figure out. I happen to like my.yahoo.com as my home page. That is, when I open my browser, that is the WWW page that automatically comes up. my.yahoo.com allows you to do all kinds of nifty customizations to your homepage: show you your stock portfolio with quotes and current value, show you the top AP News and Reuters political news stories headlines, show you a scoreboard with your favorite teams, and you can also enter URLs of your most frequently visited WWW sites so they're a click away. I am kept up-to-date on the latest news by the news stories at my.yahoo.com. I have a link to www.drudgereport.com on my homepage so I can go see what kinds of news stories he's browsed and found interesting. I also keep links to various columnists I like to read. And there's a search blank for beginning searches for information I want. That's it! Happy hunting. |