Using Search Engines
There are heaps of search engines out there and to a certain extent, which one you use depends on what you're looking for. If you already know how to use them you might like to go straight to the engines. If not, read on.
- Some, like Yahoo! have their sites indexed by subject area, while others just allow you to search by keyword.
- Some only index specialist areas of information
- Some are very popular, so slow to use, but there's probably a reason why they're popular
- Some are based in Australia which makes them faster and with more local content (experienced web surfers will tell you that some Americans aren't particularly aware of what's happening in the rest of the world)
The way you search depends on which engine you're looking for, but most follow a few basic rules:
- searches are done by keywords and the more you use them, the better you will become at working out useful keywords to help you find what you're looking for
- when you use some engines, putting inverted commas (quotation marks) around a group of words will mean that the engine searches for the whole phrase together, so "Christian chat rooms" will search for exactly that phrase
- separating words by and or a + sign(depending on the engine)will search for both/all words on a page, so Christian and chat and rooms or Christian+chat+rooms will find pages with all these words anywhere on them
- separating words by not or a - sign will exclude the word which follows, so Christian not Christians or Christian - Christians might be a useful way of distinguishing things at some stage
- With others engines, you can click on a drop down menu (little window with an arrow at one end) to choose options like 'all the words', 'some of the words' or 'exact phrase' to get the level of precision you want. On sites with a drop down menu, you don't need to know about the options below
- separating words by near will search for all words close to one another on a page, so Christian near chat near rooms will find pages with all these words close together on them
- separating words by or will search for pages with at least one of the words on them, so Christian or chat or rooms will search for pages with at least one of these words on them and will give you a huge and totally useless set of information but "chat room" or "chat rooms" near Christian might give quite useful results
For those who like to know the correct name for things, and, near, or and not are known as "Boolean operators" when used in this way and you would be doing a Boolean search
- if you want to search for a word which is also a Boolean operator, you will need to put it in inverted commas so the engine will know to treat it like a normal word - for example rock "and" roll
- most search engines will allow you to further narrow your search by defining things like dates, languages, file types and domains although you may have to use the advanced or power search option to do this
Remembering these general principles will get you quite a long way in using most search engines, but each engine is slightly different and some are way different, so to get the best out of each engine you could do a lot worse than to read the help file!!!!
And now...the engines themselves:
| AltaVista | Offers the choice of simple and advanced searches. You need to read the help pages to take advantage of the options it offers and get the best results. It also has a translation service at Babelfish |
| Sensis.com.au | Australian offshoot of AltaVista. Offers the choice of simple and advanced searches, Australia, New Zealand or the world. You need to read the help pages to take advantage of the options it offers and get the best results. At the moment (until 1 December), they are also donating money to Greening Australia for every use of the engine, so using this one could help the environment, too. |
| Yahoo | A very big Internet index. Look under Society and Culture/Religion for a comprehensive listing of Religious and Christian sites. |
| WebCrawler | Has a variety of interesting extra features as well as simple and advanced searches. |
| HotBot | Yeah, I know, the name ... but the site is easy to use, and you can make the search as complex as you like. My son started using it when he was eight or nine and seemed to be able to find anything he wanted with it, although now he tends to use Google for everything. |
| A very useful site for finding all sorts of things | |
| Lycos | Loads quite quickly. Offers free e-mail account with Hotmail. One of the more established search engines |
| Search | Loads quite quickly because it's low on graphics and offers search facilities in a number of languages other than English It's a metasearch engine. The site says " Search.com searches Google, Ask.com, LookSmart and dozens of other leading search engines to bring you the best results. " |
| Aussie.com.au | Here you can search through directories of Australian businesses and Australian people |
| VicNet | A gateway to all kinds of internet resources from Victoria's internet public access network |
| Ask.com | Formerly "Ask Jeeves".Works very differently to most engines. Allows you to ask a question eg "how do I find information on churches?" and runs searches through its own database and a number of major search engines. Also has links to Ask for Kids |
| MidCoast Search Page | A page of links to more search engines that I ever knew existed, but designing new search engines seems to have become a favourite indoor sport |
The fact that a site is linked to any pages on this site does not necessarily mean that I agree with what is presented in it or that it represents an official position of the Uniting Church in Australia (unless it is an official UCA site).