DATE: Monday, March 3, 1997                 TAG: 9703020032

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D5   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: ONLINE 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

HOW TO SEARCH THROUGH WORLD'S LARGEST LIBRARY

Two readers wrote in with the same question: ``It seems that no matter how specific I make my search statement, I always have thousands of sites found. What are some tricks to searching that would prevent this problem?''

The most important trick in searching the Internet is to start with the right kind of search engine for your particular task.

If you are looking for a Web site on a broad topic - gardening, for instance - start with a directory-style search engine that categorizes the Web. Yahoo was one of the first and remains the most popular. It allows you to search within very narrow categories (such as Business, or Business: Companies: Advertising.) Yahoo is a most democratic cataloger of the Internet, relying on Web site developers to submit descriptions of what they offer.

Sites such as Excite and Magellan take the directory concept one step further, providing their own reviews of the sites - in effect, filtering out marginal sites so that you search only the better ones (provided you trust and agree with the judgments of the site's editors). A new entry in this field is LookSmart from The Reader's Digest, which garnered a top 100 Web site rating from PC Magazine last month.

Following this strategy of providing the most relevant data to search are a large number of specialty engines that specialize in a particular topic, such as travel information (CityNet), computer advice (ZDNet), business phone numbers anywhere in the United States (BizSearch on Pilot Online), or e-mail addresses (WhoWhere). A good place to find these is Search.Com.

The broadest view of the Internet, and the most effective for finding extremely specific information - daffodil planting techniques, for instance - comes from search engines that send out robots to identify and categorize every site on the Web. The first and most popular of these is WebCrawler, but both Altavista and InfoSeek go one step further by letting you search the full text of the Web, or at least the full amount of the Web as quickly as they can categorize it.

As you might guess, the race to be the ultimate guide to the Web is extremely competitive, and search sites are continually adding new features. Altavista last week unveiled Live Topics, a visual word-association device to help sort through the thousands of responses a single request can generate. (Just start your search normally and click on Live Topics option on the response page.) And last month, Excite last month introduced NewsTracker, which lets you search content that changes daily on news sites across the Web.

Each search engine has its own peculiarities and its own set of tips for narrowing searches. Here are some common tips, as well as links to major engines' help pages, from the C:Net computer network:

Narrow the field before you start to search - many sites let you search within a predefined category.

Use quotes for phrases or proper names. If you don't put quotes around Bill Clinton, for instance, you may wind up with pages about both the Bill of Rights and singer George Clinton.

Avoid capital letters unless you want to search only for those capitalized words. Most engines will search both upper and lower case words if you use lower case in your request.

(AT)PILOT ONLINE: Pilot Online contains a number of useful ways to search the Internet. You can search Altavista as well as the Pilot Online site directly from the bottom of the home page at www.pilotonline.com. A Search page, which contains links to many Internet search engines as well as searchable archives of The Virginian-Pilot, is available from the navigation bar that appears at the top of most pages. And this column, of course, with links to the boldface words is available on the Business page at www.pilotonline.com.

Send suggestions for your toughest topics, or any other Internet-related questions, to pilot(AT)pilotonline.com with Online Column in the subject field. Or, write us at Pilot Online, 150 W. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk, VA 23510.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu