NEXT: SEARCH
ENGINES TO THE RESCUE
Search Engines to the
Rescue
There is no one best search
engine for any given search. Each has their own (highly secret!) algorithms
for sorting and indexing pages, and returning what they believe will be the
most relevant results. There is, however, one search engine that offers an
absolutely killer feature - Google's Groups allows you to search over a decade
of Usenet postings. This alone keeps Google at the top of my list - but as
far as searching for web info goes - any site might be better than any other
at any given time, for any given search. For that reason, I often use meta-search
sites like Dogpile to quickly skim the results from several different sources.
Finally, it should be
mentioned that a directory, e.g., Yahoo!, is not a search engine. Yahoo! has
real people who screen their database and make sure that what you search for
is what you'll get. This is a great service, but the web is huge and the manual
process takes time. Directories like Yahoo! are useful, but you must understand
the strengths and weaknesses of a human-indexed database.
Ready to Search So you've
chosen your search site, and the cursor is blinking in the search window waiting
for you to type in your search terms. Deciding what - exactly - to type is
(obviously) very important. It's also important to understand that success
may require the use of additional, alternative search queries.
Face to face, it'd take
you several sentences to comprehensively describe your problem to another
person. Typing the same comprehensive information into a search window is
another story. Keep that in mind when deciding on what search terms to use,
and try to choose words which anyone who was talking about the same thing
would likely use. Be aware of proper acronyms, synonyms, abbreviations, and
slang - even misspellings. People on the net come from all over the world,
and many are terrible spellers. (Nothing personal, but true.)
Windows 2000, Win2K, W2K
Motherboard, main board, system board
Hard drive, hard disk Blue Screen of Death, Blue Screen, BSOD
Description gets a bit tougher when describing the actual system. Does it
"freeze," "hang" or "lock up?" Do you say it won't "boot" or won't "start?"
Some say their system has been "rendered inoperable" others in similar situations
desribe their systems as "hosed."
Also be aware of possible misspellings and use them to your advantage. Spell-check
is a trend that's made it's way into the search world, and many search sites
will offer you a correctly-spelled alternative if you typo your search terms.
Enter "moterboard" and along with the results for that mispelling, a link
at the top will ask "Did you mean: motherboard?"
This feature can be incredibly useful when searching for specific hardware
model numbers. A search for an Asus CUSL 2 motherboard will return a response
asking "Did you mean "CUSL2?" (note that there's no space between L_2). The
query with the space before the 2 returned 4,270 hits. The query without the
space returned 52,700. Another good example is: Millennium (3,600,000 hits),
Milennium (14,900), Millenium (1,130,000). Satellite also has several variants.
Beware of Semantics
Watch extraneous Ss on
the end of words. Note that while some people may refer to a "problem" others
might find themselves having "problems." If your search engine supports "stemming"
(most do not) a search on "problem" will also bring up "problems" as it is
a 'stem.' It would also then bring up 'problematic' and 'problematical.' (This
is why "stemming" is not a popular feature - imagine all the words stemming
from "bat")
Other examples of differences
in semantics or tense:
"Frozen" instead of "freezes" or, "My motherboard's dead" means the same as
"My motherboard died" but may not show up in the same search because of the
extra "S" on "motherboard's."
The bottom line is that
there are many ways to talk about the same thing, and that recognizing this
will help you achieve better search results. Of course, there's nothing like
practice. 
