Search Engines Help Net Electronic Answers

Tue., March 5, 1996

Todd Copilevitz Dallas Morning News

Remember the card catalog you had to learn to use in high school? It just stood there in the middle of every library, daring you to master the Dewey Decimal System. To have even a prayer of finishing that term paper, you had no choice.

Can you imagine a card catalog for the World Wide Web? You’d have to drive to get from the “Be” drawer to the “Ti” area. Yet the Web is supposed to be the ultimate library at your fingertips.

So how do you find an answer in a hurry?

Fortunately, the Web is both the problem and the solution. Sprinkled around the Net are sites called “search engines” whose sole job it is to list everything on line and tell you what’s out there.

Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) is probably the best known of these indexes, but it’s not the only one, or even the most comprehensive.

So let’s say, for example, you’re a newspaper columnist who needs help with water drainage in your yard. Hey, it’s my example, I get to set the terms. Feel free to substitute your own.

Our first stop is trusty Yahoo!, where we’ll find a fill-in-the blank search form that’s used everywhere. And we come to the first stumbling block: What are we after?

This may be the most important part of your quest: picking out the terms you need to use. Search engines don’t understand questions such as, why does my yard flood? They want entries like “yard drainage.”

But I didn’t try that. Instead I thought about it too hard and figured what I really wanted to know fell into the category of hydrology. That’s the word I typed in.

Yahoo! instantly kicked back 30 entrees for my consideration, everything from civil engineering firms with hydrology departments to a hydrologist looking for work. Think he’d be interested in using my yard as a project?

Undaunted, I pressed on. Yahoo!’s search page also has a link at the bottom to other search pages. One option, labeled “More,” lists more than 100 places to try your search.

I know that seems like overkill, but hey, at least it offered a glimmer of hope.

Some search engines are fairly specialized, including the German Links, all German, all the time. But others have amazing potential.

Alta Vista (http:/ /www.altavista.digital.com) found no less than 10,000 sites with hydrology interest. The W3 Catalog (http://cuiwwwm.unige.ch/ w3catalog) found one. Open Text (http://www.opentext.com) served up 2,161 results. Magellan (http:/ /www.mckinley.com) found only 17, but ranked them for me with up to four stars and a green light if the site was deemed free of adult material. (Pornographic hydrology? Go figure.)

Then I found one of the best Web sites possible, EZ-Find at The River (http://www.theriver.com/ TheRiver/Explore/ezfind.html). From one page I could search 12 of the most popular engines, including all those I’d already been to.

All I had to do was type in my phrase and click on one of the service’s buttons. If I didn’t find the results I needed, then I click the Back button on my browser until I was at EZ-Find again.

Among the services EZ-find linked to was Dejanews (http:/ /burns.dejanews.com). Dejanews, however, doesn’t search the Web. It pours over millions of postings to Usenet newsgroups for your topic. Then it lists the messages, giving you the newsgroup it came from, the date and the author.

Then I moved on to one of the newest search engines, NlightN (enlighten, get it?). NlightN (http:/ /www.nlightn.com) will search the Web as the others do, but it also searches commercial databases, reference books, news wires and a bunch of other materials.

It doesn’t cost to run a search. But if the documents you want aren’t on the Web, NlightN charges 10 cents to deliver them.

NlightN found 38,000 hydrology listings in proprietary databases, including something from Britian entitled “Hydrology Third National Symposium Papers and Abstracts.”

There’s one other promising search engine out there, Electronic Library (http://www.elibrary.com), that lets you type in simple questions. But it does not gather Web sites; instead, it searches a database of newspapers, magazines, books and broadcast transcripts.

Eventually I got the idea I was searching too broad a topic. Hey, after four or five blows to the head, I can take a hint. So I went back to Yahoo! and tried the simple phrase “yard drainage.”

That did the trick. Entry No. 1, of 125, was from a CD-ROM on the subject. One click on the link and I had my answer: A quarter-inch slope for at least 6 feet away from the house’s foundation will make water drain away effectively. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a tape measure.

xxxx

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