Chapter 13

Needles and Haystacks: Finding Almost Anything Online

In This Chapter

Starting with basic search strategies

Finding what you’re looking for on the web

Making use of built-in searches in your browser

Finding people on the web

Creating your own starting page

“Okay, all this great stuff is out there on the Internet. How do I find it?” That’s an excellent question — thanks for asking. Questions like that one are what make this country strong and vibrant. We salute you and say, “Keep asking questions!” Next question, please.

Oh, you want an answer to your question. Fortunately, quite a bit of stuff-finding stuff (that’s a technical term) is on the web. More particularly, free services known as search engines and directories are available that cover most of the interesting material on the web. There’s even a free encyclopedia, written by Internet users like you.

You can search in dozens or hundreds of different ways, depending on what you’re looking for and how you prefer to search. Search can take some practice because billions of web pages are lurking out there, most of which have nothing to do with the topic you’re looking for. (John has remarked that his ideal restaurant has only one item on the menu, but it’s exactly what he wants. The Internet is about as far from that ideal as you can possibly imagine.)

To provide a smidgen of structure to this discussion, we describe several different sorts of searches:

• Built-in searches: Topic searches that a browser does automatically, which we aren’t always thrilled about
• Goods and services: Stuff to buy or find out about, from mortgages to mouthwash
• People: Actual human beings whom you may want to contact, find out more about, or spy on
• Topics: Places, things, ideas, companies — anything you want to find out more about

To find topics, we use the various online search engines and directories, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. To find people, however, we use directories of people — those are (fortunately) different from directories of web pages. If you’re wondering what we’re talking about, read on!

Your Basic Search Strategy

When we look for topics on the Internet, we always begin with a search engine, usually Google. (The word google has now been “verbed,” much to the dismay of the Google trademark lawyers.)

You use all search engines in more or less the same way:

1. Start your web browser, such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari.

   Flip to Chapter 6 if you don’t know what a browser is.

2. Go to your favorite search engine’s home page.

   You can try one of these URLs (web addresses): www.bing.com, www.google.com, or www.yahoo.com. We list the URLs of other search sites later in this section.

   Or, just click in the Search bar in the upper-right corner of your browser window, to the right of the Address bar. (In Chrome, it’s the same box.)

3. Type some likely keywords in the Search bar (either your browser’s Search bar or the Search bar that appears on the search engine’s home page) and press Enter.

   After a delay (usually brief, but after all, the web is big), the search engine returns a listing of links to pages that it thinks match your keywords. The full list of links that match your keywords may be way too long to deal with — say, 300,000 of them — but the search engine tries to put them in a reasonable order and lets you look at them a page at a time.

4. Adjust and repeat your search until you find something you like.

   One trick is to pick keywords that relate to your topic from two or three different directions, such as ethiopian restaurants dubuque or war women song. Here’s the secret: Think of words that would be on a page containing the information you want. After some clicking around to get the hang of it, you find all sorts of good stuff.

5. If the search engine is producing results too scattered to be useful and you can’t think of any better keywords, try the Yahoo! Directory at dir.yahoo.com.

   When you see a list of links to topic areas, click a topic area of interest. In the directory approach, you begin at a general topic and follow links to subtopics. Each page has links to pages that become increasingly specific until they link to actual pages that are likely to be of interest.

Search, Ho!

Once upon a time in an Internet far, far away, lots of search engines and directories battled with each other to see which would be the favorite. Participants were AltaVista and Dogpile and lots of other sites you can find in earlier editions of this book. Well, it seems that the first pan galactic search war is pretty much over, with Google the victor — at least for now. However, Microsoft is fighting back with its Bing search engine. Visit net.gurus.org/search for all the exciting developments.

Google, our favorite search engine

Our favorite web search engine is Google. It has little (software) robots that spend their time merrily visiting web pages and reporting what they see. It makes a humongous index of which words occurred in which pages; when you search for a topic, it picks pages from the index that contain the words you asked for. Google uses a sophisticated ranking system, based on how many other websites refer to each page in the index. Usually, the Google ranking puts the best pages first, right after a few sites that have paid to be listed at the top.

Refining your search

Using Google or any other search engine is an exercise in remote-control mind reading. You have to guess words that will appear on the pages you’re looking for. Sometimes it’s easy — if you’re looking for recipes for Key lime pie, key lime pie is a good set of search words because you know the name of what you’re looking for. On the other hand, if you have forgotten that the capital of France is Paris, it’s sometimes hard to tease a useful page out of a search engine because you don’t know which words to look for. (If you try searching for France capital, some search engines show you information about capital gains taxation in France, or Fort de France, which is the capital of the French overseas départment of Martinique. Many people must ask this question, because Google takes pity on you and tells you at the top: “Best guess for France capital is Paris.”)

Now that we have you all discouraged, try some Google searches. Direct your browser to www.google.com. You see a screen like the one shown in Figure 13-1.

Type some search terms and Google finds the pages that best match your terms. That’s “best match,” not “match” — if it can’t match all the terms, it finds pages that match as well as possible. Google ignores words that occur too often to be usable as index terms, both the obvious (ones such as and, the, and of) and merely routine (terms such as internet and mail). These rules can sound somewhat discouraging, but in fact it’s still not hard to get useful results from Google. You just have to think up good search terms. Try the recipe example by typing key lime pie and clicking the Search button. You see a response like the one shown in Figure 13-2.

Your results won’t look exactly like Figure 13-2 because Google will have updated its database since this book was published. (These results have gotten a lot better since we started using this example in earlier editions of this book. Now it understands that you’re probably looking for a recipe.) Most of the pages that Google found do, in fact, have something to do with Key lime pie — many have good recipes. Google says it found 1,130,000 matches (yow!), but in the interest of sanity it shows you about 100 of them, 10 at a time. Although that’s still probably more than you want to look at, you should at least look at the next couple of screens of matches if the first screen doesn’t have what you want. Because the list includes a lot of restaurants with Key lime pie on the menu and a hair salon named Key Lime Pie, you can simply narrow the search to only recipes by adding the keyword recipe. Search engines are dumb; you have to add the intelligence. At the bottom of the Google screen are page numbers; click Next to go to the next page.

The links in the right column and sometimes at the top of the results are sponsored links — that is, paid ads, ranked by how much the advertiser was willing to pay. Often they’re worth clicking, but remember that they’re ads. Google identifies paid ads with a little Ad icon or label.

The I’m Feeling Lucky button searches and takes you directly to the first link, which works, well, when you’re lucky.

Even more Google options

Although Google looks very simple, it has plenty of other options that can be handy. You can

• Get there from here. Type a street address, and Google offers a link to a map. Type a person’s name and a full or partial address, at least the state abbreviation, and Google gives you addresses and phone numbers. Type a phone number, and it often gives you the name and address. (Try typing 202-456-1414). The information is all collected from public sources, but if you find this process a bit too creepy, look yourself up and if it finds you, it includes a link to a page where you can have your information removed.
• Fly there from here. Type something like fly new york hong kong feb 7 feb 14 and Google’s first result is a table of airline flights and prices, calculated by their flight search subsidiary. Click on any of the results in that box and you’ll get more result pages that you can use to book a trip through an airline or travel agent web site. (For more info on buying airline tickets online, see Chapter 15.)
• Search for images and videos as well as for text. Often, Google shows relevant images or videos in with its search results. You can click any of them, or to see more images or videos, just click the Image or Videos links on any Google results page. Google has no idea what each image or video is but looks at the surrounding text and the filename of the image or video and does a remarkably good job of guessing. If you search for a key lime pie image, you indeed see dozens of pictures of tasty pies, and a video search finds a lot of videos of pie preparation. The SafeSearch feature omits pictures of naked people and the like. If you turn it off, you can find some impressively unsafe pictures.
• Read the news. Google News (click the News link or start at news.google.com) shows a summary of current online news culled automatically from thousands of sources all over the world. Warning: If you’re interested in current events, you can easily waste 12 hours a day following links from here.
• Limit your search to a specific website. If you know what site has the information you want, include site: and the website address in the search. For example, if you want to know what the New York Times says about a subject, include site:nytimes.com.
• Do painless arithmetic. Google is even a calculator. Type 2+2 and Google says 2 + 2 = 4. It knows units, so if you type 4 feet 8.5 inches, Google says 4 feet 8.5 inches = 1.4351 meters and tells you why that’s an interesting width. It can also convert currencies and metric measurements.

Bing!

Microsoft never cedes any part of the computer business without a struggle to the death, and web search is no exception. After many false starts over many years, its Bing search engine, shown in Figure 13-3, shows promise. (Bing’s background images changes daily.) Its basic operation is a lot like Google: You type some search terms and it finds you some web pages. If you would rather see images or videos, look at the clickable Images and Videos links at the top of the page (unless Microsoft moves them), just like Google. If you want maps and satellite images, use the Maps link, just like the one at Google. If you’re looking for news stories, well, you get the idea, even though Bing is reputed to mean Bing Is Not Google. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Google must be feeling extremely flattered.

Bing isn’t exactly the same as Google. In most cases, in its results, it suggests related searches you might want to try. The video search runs previews of the videos it found if you mouse over any of them, which is kind of cute. Its satellite images are different from Google’s, so you might see a clearer view in one than in the other. Overall, we don’t find any overwhelming reason to prefer Bing, but it’s worth a look.

One significant difference in Bing is that Microsoft has made it easy to embed Bing searches into other websites, including a split of the money from any ads in the search results, so you can expect to find Bing lurking in lots of other places on the web.

Browsing with Directories

Sometimes a web search just doesn’t find what you’re looking for. Coming up with the right search terms can be tricky if no specific word or phrase sums up what you want to know. This is the moment to try a web directory. If you know in general but not in detail what you’re looking for, clicking up and down through directory pages is a good way to narrow your search and find pages of interest.

Yahoo! for directories

Yahoo! is one of the oldest directories — and still a good one. You can search for entries or click from category to category until you find something you like. Start at dir.yahoo.com. As with all web pages, the exact design may have changed by the time you read this section. A whole bunch of categories and subcategories are listed on the left; click any of them to see another page that has even more subcategories and links to actual web pages. You can click a link to a page if you see one you like, or click a sub-subcategory, and so on. Figure 13-4 shows the Yahoo! Directory page for Games in Recreation.

Early on, you could easily submit a web page to Yahoo! by simply entering a page description and web address of the page into the Submissions page and waiting a week or so for the editors to look at the new page. Submitting pages is now so popular that normal submissions take a long time (months) before anyone on staff looks at them, unless you pay them $299 per year for the “express” service. You can draw your own conclusions about how the fee affects what information gets into Yahoo! (and what doesn’t).

Yahoo! also has a search engine, but it’s actually Bing underneath.

For facts, try Wikipedia first

Wikipedia, at en.wikipedia.org, is an encyclopedia you can use for free over the Internet. The site looks like Figure 13-5. Wiki means fast in Hawaiian (actually, wikiwiki does, best known before the Internet as the name of the interterminal bus at the Honolulu airport), and Wikipedia has earned its name. The Wikipedia project, which started in 2001, has grown to more than 3 million articles in English, covering almost every conceivable topic, from the Battle of Dunkirk to For Dummies books. Yes, it even has a Key lime pie article, where you read this: “Key lime pie is made with canned sweetened condensed milk, since fresh milk was not a common commodity in the Florida Keys before modern refrigerated distribution methods.” Also, since 2006, it has been the Florida state pie.

If you’re looking for the scoop on most topics, Wikipedia is a helpful place to start. You can search for article titles or article text. Words in the article body that are highlighted in blue link to other articles in Wikipedia. Many articles also have links to external websites that have more information on the topic. Articles are created and edited by a volunteer team of more than 300,000 active contributors. Wikipedias exist in dozens of other languages as well. (Adding the en characters at the beginning of its web address gets you the English version. Check out is.wikipedia.org if you’ve ever wondered what the Icelandic language looks like.)

Anyone can edit most Wikipedia articles whenever they want. This concept might seem to be a prescription for chaos, but most articles are watched over by interested volunteers, and inappropriate edits are quickly reversed, so the overall quality remains remarkably high. If you add information, you are expected to include a link to your source; like all encyclopedias, Wikipedia is not the place for original research or personal anecdotes.

If the idea of editing encyclopedia articles on your favorite subjects sounds appealing, talk to your family first. Wikipedia can be extremely addictive.

Articles are supposed to reflect a neutral point of view (NPOV, in Wikispeak), but a few topics — such as abortion, creationism, and Middle East politics — are continually debated. Wikipedia isn’t as authoritative as conventional works, like Encyclopædia Britannica, but its articles are usually up to date and to the point, with side issues dealt with by links to other articles. One particularly cool Wikipedia feature is its collection of comprehensive lists, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists, on all sorts of arcane subjects. One of our favorites is the list of countries with electric mains power plugs, voltages, and frequencies; type mains power systems in Wikipedia’s Search box to find it.

If you do a Google search on a topic, a Wikipedia article is likely to show up as one of the links Google returns. That link might be a good place to start reading.

The Usual Suspects: Other Useful Search Sites

After you surf around Yahoo!, Google, and Bing for a while, you may want to check out the competition. Here are some sites that provide specialized types of searches:

• DuckDuckGo: This quirky search engine (at duckduckgo.com or ddg.gg) promises not to collect personal information, as all the other search engines do, but does a respectable job of searching anyway. It fetches results from a wide range of other sources (with permission) ranging from Bing to the Pokemon Encyclopedia.
• About.com: This directory (at www.about.com) has several hundred semiprofessional “guides” who manage the topic areas. The guides vary from okay to very good (Margy knows a couple of very good ones), so if you’re looking for in-depth information on a topic, check About.com to see what the guide has to say. The site was purchased by the New York Times in 2005.
• Ask.com: Originally named Ask Jeeves, this site’s (at www.ask.com) original gimmick was that you could ask your question in English and it’d try to answer it. When you’re typing text into a little box, it turns out to be easier to type some keywords than a long polite sentence, but the underlying search engine is worth a try. It was purchased by the media conglomerate IAC (InterActive Corp.) in 2005.

Finding People

Finding people on the Internet is surprisingly easy. It’s so easy that, indeed, sometimes it’s creepy. Two overlapping categories of people-finders are available: those that look for people’s email and web addresses and those that look for people’s phone numbers and street addresses.

Looking for email addresses

The process of finding email and web addresses is hit-and-miss. Because no online equivalent to the telephone company’s official phone book has ever existed, your best bet is to type into Google a person’s name and a few other identifying words (such as the town where the person lives and the company where the person works) to see whether any of the matches it finds includes an address. Finding addresses by searching used to be pretty easy, but in recent years, as spammers have taken to scraping off the web every address they can find, a lot of websites now munge (obscure) or delete email addresses.

You can search online all you want, but there’s no substitute for calling someone up and asking, “What’s your email address?”

Googling for people

Type someone’s name and address at Google (for the address, type at least the state abbreviation, but more is better), and it shows you matches from phone book listings.

If you’re wondering whether someone has a website, use Bing or Google to search for the person’s name. If you’re wondering whether you’re famous, use Bing or Google to search for your own name to see how many people mention you or link to your web pages. (If you do it more than once, you’re ego surfing.) If you receive email from someone you don’t know, search for the email address — unless the message was spam, the address is bound to appear on a web page somewhere.

Using other people-search sites

Here are some other sites that search for people:

• Canada 411: Canada 411 (canada411.ca) is a complete Canadian telephone book, sponsored by the major Canadian telephone companies. Aussi disponsible en français, eh? For several years, the listings for Alberta and Saskatchewan were missing, leading to concern that the two provinces were too boring to bother with, but they’re all there now, proving that they’re just as gnarly as everyone else.
• Yellow pages directories: Quite a few “yellow pages” business directories, both national and local, are on the web, like those at www.superpages.com and www.yp.com.

We’re from Your Browser, and We’re Here to Help You

Every search engine wants to be your best friend, which, no doubt by coincidence, will increase its market share. (Who? Us? Opinionated?) To cement this friendship, browser makers go to great effort to arrange things so that when you type some search words, the search happens on its own search engine rather than on anyone else’s.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all have the Search bar to the right of the Address bar, as shown in Figure 13-6.

If you type a word or phrase in the Search bar, your browser opens your preferred search engine and displays the results of a search for whatever you typed. Or, if you type on the Address bar an entry that doesn’t look like an address, it pretends that you typed it on the Search bar and searches anyway. (Google Chrome has only one box where you type something, and it decides what you want.) How convenient is that! You can specify which search engine you want this feature to use:

• Firefox: Choose a search engine from its short list by clicking the Search Engine icon to the right of the Address bar (and to the left of the Search bar). Click the icon and choose a different site. Or, choose Manage Search Engines to display a list of search engines that Firefox knows about and add your favorites.
• Google Chrome: Click the Customize (little wrench) icon to the right of the Address bar, select Options, click the Basics tab if it isn’t already selected, and set Default Search to your favorite search site. Click the Manage button if you want to choose a site that isn’t on their list.
• Internet Explorer: Choose Tools⇒Internet Options, click the General tab if it isn’t already selected, and click the Settings button in the Search section.
• Safari: Click the little magnifying glass in the Search bar, where the menu offers a choice between Google and Yahoo!.

Too Many Toolbars

Every search engine vendor offers a toolbar that you can add to your browser. The toolbar is a bar above your browser’s main window with the Search bar and some other stuff on it, such as links to relevant websites and sometimes browser tools such as pop-up blockers. Back when browsers were young and had no Search bars or built-in pop-up blockers, the toolbars were somewhat useful. These days, they’re mostly a way to force another search-engine-specific Search bar into your browser, taking up space on your screen that would otherwise be available to look at web pages (refer to Figure 13-7).

We generally recommend that you decline any invitations to install browser toolbars, because their value is negligible. If a specific toolbar has a specific feature you want that isn’t otherwise available in your browser, such as the page rank display on the Google toolbar, it doesn’t hurt to install it, other than losing that half-inch of screen real estate.

To get rid of unwanted toolbars in Internet Explorer, right-click in a blank part of any menu or toolbar to open a menu where you can deselect the ones you don’t want. To get rid of toolbars in Firefox, choose Tools⇒Add-Ons (which shows all add-ons, including the toolbars), click the one you don’t want, and then click the Uninstall or Remove button that appears.