Tons of search engines are out there. Novices will feel most comfortable in a friendly, easy-to-manipulate environment such as Yahoo!, About.com, or AskJeeves, while power users swear by Google (hands down the best search engine around), AltaVista, and HotBot, the engines that store the most sites. Other well-known engines are Excite, Infoseek, LookSmart, Lycos, and WebCrawler, and there's plenty more out there, believe me. Each one has its advantages and its disadvantages. Some, like AltaVista, are search indexes, which attempt to index all the sites they visit, based on the text of each site. Subject directories like Yahoo! act more as a "card catalog," assigning each site to a subject category. More specialized search engines abound, such as the Brittanica Internet Guide, which focuses more on encyclopedia-like sites about history, science, the arts, and so forth; LookSmart, which offers a smaller, more detailed database; and Lycos, which gives you more control over your search, as well as focusing more on pages concerning art, science, and literature. Most of the directories and smaller search engines provide links to the behemoths such as AltaVista, Google, or Excite in case their smaller database doesn't contain what you want; conversely, some search engines like AltaVista are supplementing their sites with directory listings. (Web addresses for these search engines, and others, are in the Search Engine Links and Metasearch Engine Links pages of this site.) Search sites have come under fire for not investing in new technology, selling rankings in search results, censoring results from rival sites, and focusing more on advertising and marketing to do a decent job of searching the Web for you. If you think a particular search site is failing you, you've got plenty of other sites to choose from. And remember: according to rather old (i.e. pre-Google) data from the NEC Research Institute, the most complete search engine available, Northern Light, only covers 16% of the sites out there. AltaVista and NCBi (formerly Snap!) cover 15.5%, HotBot covers 11.3%, and things drop off from there, with Lycos and EuroSeek limping in with less than 3% coverage. There are almost 1.5 billion Web sites as of February 2000; think the number has shrunk since then? The NEC researchers recommend using metasearch engines such as Dogpile or MetaCrawler and performing multiple searches on different search engines. Note that this survey was done around 1999; Google has since lapped AltaVista and the others as the most complete search engine around.

The best search engines index less than 1 in 6 of the Web sites out there (currently numbering somewhere around 1.5 billion, so don't restrict your search to one engine or directory.

A number of search engines such as Microsoft's, AOL's, GoTo, and Yahoo!, among others, use the search engine software provided by Inktomi (www.inktomi.com). Inktomi has released the third generation of its search technology, called GEN3. The claims are that it currently indexes over 500 million Web documents and has the ability to hold over a billion. The new search technology can be seen at any Inktomi-driven site.

A few basics of the kinds of search engine styles:

• Any words. This is what most novice searchers enter, and they end up with yea thousand results, most of which aren't anywhere close to what they want. An any-word search for "Martin Luther King" turns up pages about Martin Tupper, purple martins, Martin Luther, Luther Vandross, King George III, the rock band King Crimson, and who knows what else.

• All words. These kinds of searches turn up indexed pages with every search word, in order. You stand a better chance of finding what you're looking for, but off-topic results are still very possible. For example, entering an all-word search for "Martin Luther King birthdate" may give you a page about Leon Smith, the NBA rookie who went to MLK High School.

• Exact phrase. Every indexed page containing the exact phrase turns up. Carefully worded phrases can often turn up very useful results, though spurious results still pop up.

Here are some tips on using the more advanced search features (often listed under "Power Search" or "Advanced search":

• Boolean search You're using algebraic notation, more or less, to group and set off your search parameters. Bare bones Boolean entries use AND, NOT, and OR to narrow down results, such as "UNC AND Tarheels AND basketball NOT football" to find info about the UNC Tarheels basketball program, but to weed out pages about the football program. Parentheses often come into play, such as "Independence Day AND (NOT movie)" to find pages about the topic of Independence Day, but to weed out pages about the movie of the same title. Many people find Boolean searching quite difficult. If you do go for Boolean operations, don't forget the NEAR attribute. It works something like AND, except that it insists that the two words be near each other. Most Web search sites default to a NEAR distance of 10 or 20 words. You might also like some shorthand notations for commonly used Boolean operands. AND is the same as & is the same as +. OR is the same as |. NOT is the same as ! is the same as -. NEAR is the same as ~. ( ) is the same as " ". And this should confuse you: when you put items of a search phrase within parentheses or quotation marks, you are telling the search engine that you want to find only those pages that contain all of the items of the search phrase in the order shown within parentheses or quotation marks. So, for example, searching for lions and tigers produces a list of all pages that mention both lions and tigers. Meanwhile, searching for "lions and tigers" or (lions and tigers) produces a list of all pages that contain the phrase lions and tigers in that order. That list of results in the second bullet doesn't include any pages that mention only lions or pages that mention only tigers. Nor does it list any pages that mention tigers and lions. (Note the different order of the words in the phrase.) Whee!

• Combining Boolean operands: There's no limit on how you can use Boolean operators to expand or focus your search phrases. You can just keep adding them until you find what you want, and don't find what you don't want. For example, you could run this entire search:
  lions AND tigers AND bears OR "dorothy and toto" NOT "wicked witch"
  That search would help you discover almost any Wizard of Oz pages that don't mention the Wicked Witch.

• Categories. Much easier. Most directories, such as Yahoo!, separate their indexed pages into a multilevel directory -- categories. Thus, this site might be found under "Computers -- Software -- Operating Systems -- Microsoft -- Windows" or some such. Usually you can search within categories.

• Read the site instructions. Every site does things differently, sometimes dramatically so.

• Exclude words. Sort of a "Boolean lite" technique, this involves putting a minus sign ( - ) in front of a word to exclude it. A search for "salsa -dance" gives you more pages on the condiment and less on the dance.

• Include words. The flip side of the above. Put a plus sign in front of words you want to ensure appear in the pages. Good for fine-tuning any-word searches.

• Number of results. Unless you're impatient or your connection is slow, go for the maximum.

• Personalization. These are the search sites' attempts to become your "portal" to the Internet. Usually they're highly configurable for your tastes, and often offer other services such as Webmail, personal calendars, etc.

• Quoted phrases. Define entire phrases for searching. "Lord of the Rings" inside quotation marks will give more pages about the Tolkien trilogy as opposed to an any-word search. Probably the most useful single tip in this list.

• Search form. A few sites give you short forms to use for focusing your searches. You may be able to set the desired languages, restrict the search to a particular domain, search for titles only, etc.

• Search within results. Some sites let you modify your search and search again within the previous results.

• Word forms. These search for variants of given words: "mouse" also gives results for "mice," or "children" for "child."

Finetune your searches:

• Start within a specific category, if available.

• Avoid computer-specific terms such as "file," "folder," or "memory," unless you intend that meaning.

• If you can use the advanced search features, then do so.

• Find proper names faster by surrounding them in quotes.

• If you get too few results, switch to any-word search, or reduce the number of keywords; for too many results, try switching to an all-word search or add keywords

• Avoid articles (a, an, the); the search engines ignore them.

• If you're using a plain-English search such as Ask Jeeves, restrict yourself to very simple questions: "Where is Constantinople?" "Who is Marilyn Monroe?"

• Spell the words right.

Try to use a larger number of words to limit your search. For example, hunting up a page on North Carolina men's basketball will be more productive if you use a search query something like NORTH CAROLINA TARHEELS COLLEGE BASKETBALL MEN NCAA rather than just NORTH CAROLINA BASKETBALL. Also, it's helpful to include synonyms when possible; for example, when hunting down something on MONITORS, include the word DISPLAYS also. Try searching for both upper- and lower-case versions of the words. Try singular instead of plural words. Avoid letter/number combinations such as "Windows NT" or "3DO technology."

Google is probably the single most used search engine out there. Although it is quite simple to use, and almost eerily accurate, there are methods that will make Google results even better. First, use the Google Toolbar (available at toolbar.google.com/) if you have Internet Explorer 5 or later. Even the advanced Google search options are available on the toolbar. If you have another browser, use the Google Buttons (available at www.google.com/options/buttons.html) on your browser's toolbar, or try GGSearch from www.frysianfools.com/ggsearch/. Another tip is to have Google open its links in new windows; in the Toolbar, click the Google button and select "Search Preferences Page." Check the box labeled "Open search results in a new window." Google will also translate pages in foreign languages; copy the page's address, and in the toolbar, click the Google button, select "Language Tools," paste the copied URL into the "Translate a Web Page" field, select your language from the drop-down menu, and click Translate. Google also translates foreign phrases; in the same "Language Tools" page, enter the phrase in the "Translate Text" field, and press Translate. (Don't expect miracles on the translations, but you should get enough information to at least get the gist of the phrase.) Not enough parameters? Try www.google.com/advanced_search; if that isn't enough, try the Google Ultimate Interface, with lots of parameters that Google itself doesn't include, such as date ranges, file types, language, and country. Check it out at www.faganfinder.com/google.html. Want a definition of a word? Search for the word, and click on the underlined word in the blue bar at the top of the results page for a quick definition from Dictionary.com, or find the definition of a word by typing "define:word." If you're unsure of the spelling of a word, just enter "Spell:" followed by the word, like so: "Spell: speling" (don't include the quotes). And for absolute language fun, go through the Preferences link and choose a language from the drop-down menu to have Google's display in any of 88 languages and dialects, including some silly ones like Elmer Fudd, Pig Latin, or Klingon. Qa'pla!

Google limits its search phrases to 10 words, so shorter is better. And word order matters: a search for "tarheel basketball" gives a different set of results than "basketball tarheel."

Google has a plethora of syntax tricks that most of us don't use. You can find out more at www.google.com/help/operators.html, but here are some of the most useful. Intitle: at the beginning of a query, use this to find words or phrases restricted to the titles of Web pages: i.e. intitle:"Three Blind Mice" . Intext does the opposite: a query for intext:"Three Blind Mice" hunts down the phrase in the body of Web pages without looking through the titles. A good example is using the syntax "intext:HTML" to find pages that talk about HTML without getting results like www.fubar.com/index.html . Use the Link syntax to find out who's linked to a particular page: for example, I might type in link:http://www.toejumper.net to see who's linking to this site. The site syntax restricts searches to particular domains: for example, I might do best hunting down scholastic references to, say, Mark Twain by restricting my search to .EDU sites: I would use "Mark Twain"site.edu to find these pages. I could refine my search even more by using a combination: for example, intext:"Mark Twain"site.edu to find only .EDU pages with Twain in the title.

It's easy enough to use the Google Toolbar to search within a specific site, but you can use the syntax directly: to search within this site, type "site:toejumper.net google" (without quotes) to hunt down all Google references in these pages.

The plus (+) and minus (-) symbols have their uses in Google. To force Google to include so-called "stop words" (words it normally ignores, such as the), place a plus in front of it: +the. To exclude words, use the minus symbol. Don't put spaces between the symbols and the words.

Want to find something in your area? Go to local.google.com and enter whatever you're looking for along with the city, state, or ZIP code.

Find maps for a specific location by typing "map location" (without the quotes, and where the word "location" is replaced by the city or state you desire). More exacting maps results can be had by entering a US street address along with the city, state, and/or ZIP code. Entering a phone area code gets you a regional map.

Find someone by entering their phone number: you get a name, an address, and a map which can lead you to their front door. Makes you leery about giving out your own phone number to just anyone, doesn't it? Looking for someone? Enter their name, city, and state into the search box and see what comes up. It's not always accurate: for example, I learned that I'm a basketball player for the Loyola Greyhounds. News to me...!

Google gives us a nifty calculator that can be used from the search box: go to www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator.

Enter FedEx, US Postal Service, or UPS tracking numbers to track errant packages. Entering a UPC (Universal Product Code) gets you info on the product and its maker. Entering an airline flight number, such as "United Airlines 150" (without the quotes) gets you info on the flight.

Google News, though comprehensive and up-to-date, can't be customized, so you're stuck with information you don't necessarily want. You can drag the linked name of a News section such as Sports to IE's Links toolbar, and then click that link when you want to see sports news. Links to the other Google news sections appear on the left side of each news section's page.

"The In URL and All In URL Options:" The InURL option is simple: by using the search keyword, you force Google to only hunt within URLs themselves. You wouldn't find this site by using "inurl:troubleshooting", but you would find it by using "inurl:toejumper" (leave out the quotes). If you're not sure of the entire URL of a particular site, precede your Google search phrase with "allinurl:" For example, if you're looking for the URL of a site with the words Tarheel Basketball, type "allinurl: tarheel basketball" (again, sans quotes).

Find locations fast by entering the address into the Google search field; you'll get two links, one to Yahoo! Maps and the other to MapQuest. Find out about phone numbers by entering the area code and number you're curious about (like this: 123 456-7890) and see if useful information comes up.

Want to know if your site is listed in Google? For the fewest and most accurate hits, substitute your Web domain name for each "example" in the following: example site:www.fubar.com and enter it into Google's search field.

Finding images in Google is simple; just use the Images button on the home page, the "Search Images" button on the Toolbar, or go to images.google.com/. For best results, select "Advanced Image Search" and start with the "related to the exact phrase" field.

Stock ticker imformation can be accessed by simply putting in the appropriate symbol, say NYSE, AMEX, or NASDAQ, and clicking the "Show stock quotes" link at the top of the page to get a special page from Yahoo! Finance, along with tabs to get info from ClearStation, The Motley Fool, MSN MoneyCentral, and Quicken.

Broadband users can change their results numbers from 10/page to 30/page with a neglible loss in download time. Just make the changes in the Preferences page, as detailed above.

Want to search within a site? The Toolbar has a "Search Site" button that makes it simple, once you go to the site itself.

Use the Adult Filter to keep out the adult-related sites and images by going through the Preferences link, scrolling down to SafeSearch Filtering, and clicking "Use Strict Filtering."

View .PDF files in HTML simply by clicking on the "View as HTML" link. It won't always display as nicely as the actual .PDF file, but you can see it well enough to decide whether it's worth the download. In fact, Google can hunt down file types: just use the "filetype" search marker, as in "filetype:doc tarheel basketball" (sans quotes, as always) to find .DOC files about Tarheel basketball. Other file types include Adobe Acrobat files (.pdf), Lotus 1-2-3 files (.wk1, .wk2, and so forth), Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (.ppt), Rich Text files (.rtf), Flash (.swf), regular text (.ans, .txt), and others.

Find quotes or phrases by wrapping the portion you do know in quotation marks, i.e. "I pity the fool" -- just enter it and find out the rest of the quote and who said it.

Note: Yahoo! is rather unique in the way it handles search queries. It assumes that every word you enter is part of an AND strand (i.e. "North AND Carolina AND basketball") unless you go into the Advanced options and choose the "Matches on any word (OR)" choice. Then you have to insert the + sign to get the AND operation.

Don't forget, you can bookmark and save search pages, to use at a later time. Or for real down-the-road use, copy them to your hard disk with SurfSaver (www.surfsaver.com/). It's free.

As mentioned above, some search sites give you a "natural language" option which purport to translate your English phrasings (often questions such as "Where can I find a '59 Corvette page?") into something that search engines can use. Computers don't work this way; don't use this option, unless you're using the AskJeeves, Excite, or Lycos Pro engines (see below), and then don't expect miracles. However, Ask Jeeves and its associate AltaVista do quite well with simple questions such as "How do I learn about patent law?"

Excite has recently refined its natural search option, calling it the "Zoom In" feature. Now you enter your search phrase, press the Zoom In button, and Excite provides you with a list of alternate terms and phrases that might help you narrow the focus of your search. Naturally, it works best with broader topic searches.

Start with as narrow a search as you can. Use a specialized search engine to search a narrower database if that's possible.

If a site has advanced search options, learn to use them. One useful example is HotBot's advanced site, which you can learn from the info on www.hotbot.com/help/tips/search_features.asp. HotBot, Lycos, and the others doing this have tried hard to make it easier for plain folks to use.

Typing multiple words in a search box will give you varying results depending on the search engine. Yahoo! assumes you want an OR between each word (i.e. "North OR Carolina OR Tarheels") and gives you results from pages with any of those words in them. HotBot assumes that you want an AND between each word (i.e. "North AND Carolina AND Tarheels") and gives you search results restricted to all of those words. You're dependent on each search engine's default assumptions; hunt them out.

By using the phrasing "title: Pearl Jam" (without the quotes), you restrict the search engine to finding only those sites with the phrase "Pearl Jam" in their titles. In this case, you'd avoid getting a million listings of homepages from people who "reely love Pearl Jam" and say so on their site, right above the picture of their beagle.

If you put a domain name such as .COM or .EDU in your search string, most engines will only pull up sites with those domains.

The "url" option restricts engines to presenting you with results from sites with the given word or phrase in the site's URL. For example, the search string "url: sasquatch" would give you www.sasquatch.com and www.whattheheck.com/sasquatch but not www.bigfoot.com.

Some engines support the "host field" option. In this case, you could use the string "host: ebay.com" (again, no quotes) and limit your search to pages on the EBay site.

Some engines also support the "related" option, where you can type "related: www.microsoft.com" and get pages that the engine lists as being related to Microsoft's home page.

An even more restrictive search option is the "image" selection. Type "image: penguin" to find only images with the word "penguin" in their file names. Not always useful, as many sites use codes or odd combinations of characters to name their images -- check out the various NASA sites, for example, for beautiful shots of the Ring Nebula named "STS-4356id6.jpg" or something similar and uninformative.

"Wildcards" isn't just a term for your black-sheep inlaws, it means symbols that stand for something else. An asterisk * means "anything," so searching for the string "mam*" gets you results on "mama," "Mame," "mam4," "mamma," whatever's out there. A few search engines automatically insert invisible wildcards at the end of every search phrase, so searching for "flow" gets you results on "flowers," "flowbee," "flow-control," and all sorts of possibly irrelevant results. Use quotations marks to rid yourself of the automatic wildcards.

Here's a list of examples of some commonly used wildcards and an explanation for each one:

• WIN* searches for any file starting with the letters win -- Windows, wince, wine cellar, etc.

• DATA searches for any file containing the word data -- databank, rawdatafile, etc.

• *UP searches for any file ending with the letters up -- backup, fouled up, etc.

• P?P searches for any three-letter filename beginning and ending with the letters P -- pip, pop, pup, etc.

• *??T searches for any filename and its accompanying extension ending in the letter T -- README.TXT. AUTOEXEC.BAT, etc. etc.

"Field" searches limit your search to web pages' "fields," such as the title, the URL, or the top-level domain.

If the search engine is subdivided into categories, drill down into the category that is applicable to your search before submitting a search query. You'll often find more, and more relevant, results.

Use quotation marks to force a multi-word phrase to appear, for example, "fox terrier" will not give you pages devoted to Scotties or Cairn terriers, or foxes.

Most search engines let you save successful searches for later browsing; you can also bookmark search pages.

Tailor your search query to a single site by using the HOST protocol: if you only wanted to search the ZDNet site for information about board games, you would type HOST:ZDNET.COM"BOARD GAMES" to limit your search to that particular site.

AltaVista (www.altavista.com/) gives you the option to hunt down pages containing specific Java applets by using the "applets:class" search parameter. Just replace the term "class" with the name of the applet you're looking for, lose the quotation marks, and begin your search.

AltaVista and some others will let you use the "like:URL" modifier to search for sites similar to the one you list.

Some search engines let you use a text-only version; use this version to speed up your searches.

Multi-search engines are coming into vogue. Dogpile, MetaCrawler, All4One, MetaSeek, and others combine up to 20 different search engines in their queries. Lots of users don't even bother going to single search engines anymore, rather, they go straight to one of the meta engines.

Running a complex search or hunting for more than one item? Run your search, bookmark the first page of your results, and keep searching. Check your bookmarked sites later.

Search for your target words, but also include synonyms and common variants when possible. Language-impaired? Try www.thesaurus.com/ for help.

From a Search Results page on Yahoo! (and also from the Yahoo! home page,) you can opt for a more sophisticated set of options for your keywords. On any of those pages, click the "Advanced Search" link to see the Search Options page. From here you can give Yahoo! more clues than the raw keywords that you use in a simple search. You can: choose between Category and Site searching, apply Boolean search operators to your keywords, select to avoid the Web entirely in favor of Usenet newsgroups, and alter the time period of your search.

Northern Light (www.northernlight.com/) has a special collection of 2900+ full-text periodicals unavailable elsewhere on the Web. Searching it is free, but downloading full-text articles can cost from $1 to $4. Researchers who find Lexis-Nexis too pricey may want to give Northern Light a try. Another alternative is InfoBeat, which feeds your e-mail account with ton lots of general news and information. I'd recommend setting up a freemail account for this, since InfoBeat tends to overwhelm you with stuff. Try this free service from www.infobeat.com/.

Don't forget to search Usenet (groups.google.com/) for info.

Off-line search tools are becoming more popular, especially for those power searchers who grind their teeth when AltaVista gives them a kazillion sites to hunt through for a single piece of information. The available utilities run the gamut from giving you automated search functions, weeding out invalid and outdated links, compiling results from several search engines, and letting you group links by category for later perusal. Copernic 2001 comes highly recommended.

Want to pick up a little Internet litter? When you enter a URL and get the "Error: 404" message, submit that site to one of the major search engines such as HotBot or AltaVista. Their spider will visit the site, see it doesn't exist, and delete it from its listings. That way the next searcher doesn't get that link returned to them on their search. They ought to give a Boy Scout award for this one.