Seek and ye shall find

WITHOUT a doubt, the most indispensable tools on the World Wide Web are the variety of search engines and search indexes which can help users locate Web pages of interest.

Sometimes when you're online, you will already know the Web page you want to go to, and you have its exact address, also known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). But more often than not you're looking for a Web site which you know does exist but you don't have its address. Or you are interested in a topic and want to track down more information. Either way, a search site should be your first stop.

Two kinds of sites offer differing kinds of information. Search indexes such as Yahoo, Infoseek, and Excite categorise Web pages into a large subjectoriented index. In other words, an employee of Yahoo or whoever has already looked at a wide range of pages and chosen to include only those which seem most useful, and put them into the appropriate subcategory. So your search results will be smaller, but more defined.

Web search engines lay claim to categorising every publicly accessible Web page; consequently the search results can be both vast and spotty. For example, entering "sailing" as your keyword for a search will return hundreds of thousands of "hits" (pages which match your query), but many pages will have nothing to do with the specific aspect of sailing which interests you.

So it's worth learning some of the simple search techniques which will help you to narrow your results. All search sites have a "help" section to aid you in conducting a more productive search, and once you get the hang of the basics, spend a little more time reading through any "advanced searches" options the engine might have, which offer simple but highly productive additional methods (see panel below).

Although you will probably want to stick to a favourite engine or two, any Web user will want to become familiar with several search engine facilities and occasionally check back with them to see what's new. Many sites, particularly the indexes, offer a wide range of services, including "personalised" news pages. You set these up very easily, choosing topics of interest, then every time you open "your" page it's updated with the latest news stories, weather, stock market prices etc.

Here's a rundown of some of the best known sites:

. Yahoo (its address is http://www.yahoo.com), which describes itself as a "hierarchical subject oriented guide", began life as a hobby project by two Stanford University students who wanted to categorise their own interests on the Web. It is still one of the best places for absolute beginners, with sections that explain the Internet and how to use it. Yahoo doesn't try to categorise everything on the Web, instead opting for a selective, subject based approach that's extremely user friendly. There is also a UK/Ireland version you can jump to from the main site.

. Webcrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com) is another of the originals. Begun in 1994 as another student project, it was acquired for a time by America Online, and sold recently to another search site, Excite. Excite also owns Magellan (http:www.mckinley.com), which takes a subject oriented approach. Why it has these two smaller engines, as well as its own on the Excite site, is not clear, and visitors to Magellan and Webcrawler might never realise they're the property of Excite.

. Excite (http://www.excite.com), though, has been expanding its own site rapidly in the past year. Along with online chat rooms and a facility which allows you to tailor make a personal news page, Excite introduced a topnotch free clippings service called Newstracker in January. Newstracker lets you search over 300 newspapers and magazines by subject and set up a personal service which will track up to seven categories of stories.

. Infoseek (http://ww.infoseek.com) has also expanded aggressively in the past 12 months and now wants to be seen not as a search index but a "service organisation". Initially, it contained only about a million pages of searchable text, but its strength was "smart" search toots which often gave a more focused and documented result. Nowadays it has become a favourite of reviewers for its comprehensiveness and ability to conduct searches from "natural language" queries. In other words, you can actually ask it questions.

. Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), developed by the venerable Carnegie Mellon University, is another of the earliest search engines and, like the other main sites, provides everything from constantly updated stock quotes to downloadable (US) road maps, a subject guide to sites and a useful multimedia index which can be searched for pictures and sound files.

. HotWired's HotBot site (http://www.hotbot.com) is one of the best for broad searches - it claims to search 50 million documents. It's also the easiest to use if you want to filter your search without having to learn the use of "Boolean operators" (see panel); it is especially good on pinpointing particular people. HotBot uses simple pull down menus to place limits on your search, and offers suggestions for refining searches even further. The actual layout of the site can be a little confusing until you figure out the menus and where to click, though.

. Digital's AltaVista (http://www.alta vista.digital.com) is the granddaddy of the fast and vast search engines. It had over 3 00,000 users in its first week, jumping quickly to two million; now it gets 30 million "hits" a day. AltaVista seems to remain a favourite with Web users, both because it returns such a range of responses and because it allows advanced searches with a number of useful constraints. "LiveTopics" is particularly nifty; once you do an initial search you can click to LiveTopics, which will offer you a selection of terms to associate with your key terms for subsequent searches. There is also a UK mirror site for AltaVista which you can click to from the main site.

. And if once isn't enough, then try a few "metasearch" sites which conduct searches on four engines (all4one - at http://www.all4one.com), five engines (Metacrawler - http://www.metacrawler.com) and 19 engines (http://williams.cs.colostate.edu:1969/) at the same time. Dublin City University offers a Java enabled meta search engine called Fusion which searches six engines and combines the results (http://lorca.compapp.dcu.ie/fusion/search.html).

. Finally, Windows 95 and Windows NTusers can download a free application, WebFerret, from Macmillan which will search most Web engines at once and discard duplicate results (http://www.mcp.com/netferret).