The web is an endless stream of information - but finding the information you're interested in can be an exercise in frustration. You know it's out there, but where? The following guide is designed to help you dig that needle from beneath the haystack -- and help you find your way back to those sites you forgot to bookmark.

You Are Not Alone

Something that works on your side is the fact that unless you're very, very special, you're likely not the first person to experience the very problem you're trying to resolve. The answer is out there. Resources at Your Fingertips If you know all the types of sites offering the sort of information you're interested in, you'll know if you missed something. Here's a short list:

Manufacturers' Sites - It's tantamount to asking "Are you sure the power switch is on?" - but people often overlook the most obvious place to go for help. Hardware and software companies alike will often have very useful information posted, in the form of searchable support databases and FAQs. You might find updated drivers as well, or a software patch or update.

Software Publishers' Sites - Obviously, look here for help with programs and operating systems -- but don't forget that many heavy-duyt applications and games reveal shortcomings in hardware.

Tech Sites - Sites like Targetpc are constantly thrashing computer hardware and reporting on their findings. There are also myriad other specialized sites, offering info on specific areas of computing, ranging from digital video production to networking. Look for "Links" pages on sites you already like, and check out a directory such as Yahoo! to find more.

PC Gaming Sites - No one thrashes their hardware harder or runs into more problems than an avid gamer. Always shuffling video cards and likely to overclock anything, gamers know hardware. Well, fast hardware that's suitable for gaming, anyway.

User Groups - There are UGs for almost every aspect of computing you can think of, from using Lotus or WordPerfect (still!). Still others are less focused, being general PC users groups, comrpised of techie-types. Many publish electronic newsletters with frequently useful bits of information.

Hardware "Groupie" Sites - Many popular pieces of hardware have dedicated fans who will host an 'unofficial' web site to share information about a particular motherboard, cd burner, even a specific chipset or chipset manufacturer.

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."

Operators Are Standing By
Operators, Boolean and otherwise, are commands and/or symbols you can enter along with your search terms to help the algorithm understand what you want. You can make sure that results include a number of words, or do not include certain words. This can be important for words like Lotus, which is a software publisher, a flower, an auto manufacturer, and a yoga position -- not to mention a rare and powerful card in the popular fantasy game "Magic."

Another good example of how much trouble it can be to find exactly what you want is a simple search for information about common species of bird - Baltimore orioles. Enter that into a search engine and see how many results you get that are not focused on the baseball team. By adding some words to our search and using operators, we can try to work around these sports fans.

Common operators:
+ or AND (+Baltimore +orioles, or Baltimore AND orioles -- tells the search engine you only want to see pages containing both terms. Note that Baltimore +orioles is different, resulting in a list of pages with both terms at the top of the list, but also including just 'baltimore' at the end. ) - or NOT (Baltimore -oriole forces the search engine to return pages only including the term Baltimore - but not pages that also include the word oriole) OR (Handy when something has more than one common name, i.e., "hard disk OR drive"

Here are some proposed search strategies for bird watchers:

Baltimore orioles -baseball (results not good)
Baltimore orioles -baseball -sports -score (a little better)
Baltimore orioles birds (no better) Best tip? Omit the 's' from "orioles"
Baltimore oriole (BINGO! Great results!

While it stands to reason that ornithologists might frequently speak of a single oriole, it's uncommon to hear a single Baltimore baseball player called an oriole).

Phrase Searches

Using quotation marks "like this" will force the search engine to return results where the words between the quotes appear exactly as you've entered them. This is great for song lyrics, and also searching for people's names ("first last").

More advanced techniques

Beyond these techniques are more specialized tricks; some search engines offer more and/or different features than others. For example, you might specify the language you prefer your search be limited to, or you might only be interested in finding articles posted within a certain amount of time. You can also limit your search to one particular domain, or even specify which part of a web document you want to search - such as in the title or url only.

Scott Salveson