Thoughts on searching as of 2/19/00

I started teaching this class a few years back and things have obviously changed a lot since then. I don't have the time to update everything (this is the last time I'll teach this class), but I can give you a snapshot of what I think are useful user tips for now.  Some tips will remain good for a long time, others will be outdated by this time next year.

Timeless tip #1: The more thinking you can do yourself, the less the computer has to do, and the better and faster your results will be. Example from a past class: looking for houses in Northern Virginia.  A search of the whole Internet for these terms yielded thousands and thousands of partly-relevant pages. So the students thought: Who sells houses in Northern Virginia?  They typed out a likely address  for a NoVA realtor , and within minutes had pages of NoVA listings.  

Timeless tip #2: Recomendations from friends and experts are often better than recommendations from computers.  Not always, but generally, if you want info on colored ice, and you find a web page on colored ice that has colored ice related links - where the page author has collected his favorite links - those links will be better than what you get by typing "colored ice" into a search engine. About.com built a whole site on this principle.

Timeless tip #3: Internet searching is very much like driving - studying the map helps, but mainly, experience makes you better.  A lot of knowing how and where to find stuff is just a  matter of experience - it's what you learn just being out on the road every day.

Temporary tip #4: In my opinion, the Internet searcher of February 2000 should be familiar with these search sites:

Yahoo.com - It's the most-visited site on the net.  Anyone who makes a page knows they have to register it with Yahoo. It's just not that powerful (small, dated set of pages indexed) or well-built (clunky interface). Bonus: Yahoo mail is popular and well-rated. Get an account and you'll have two good reasons to use their site.

Altavista.com - The trusty bridesmaid of search engines.  Not quite the biggest, not quite the most acccurate, not quite the best, but always among the top choices, which makes it overall a good choice.

About.com - The site with expert guides.  About.com guide pages are almost always very good choices.  Their regular indexed searches I dunno about. Their interface is among the worst - very cluttered and hard for newer users to interpret.

Ask.com - Ask Jeeves, the natural language search engine.  If it's something that you feel that people have asked many times before ("What is the GDP?"), AskJeeves often has the answer.  People seem to like this site.

Metacrawler.com - Metacrawler sends your search terms to a dozen or more sites and returns you the averaged answers.  It's a good way to reach into a lot of places at once, so it seems like it would be good for obscure info.  

Google.com - Google is a smaller index built around the idea for Timeless Tip #2 above - it orders search results based on how many other pages link to a site. Very good for when you want to know what everyone else thinks is the best reference on a topic.