Nick Hill's Super Search Selection Help page
Which is the best search for the job?
Key: Excellent 1* 1 2 3 Good Google Groups Nearly all ISPs (Internet service providers) have a news server. News clients (Like email clients) synchronise with a server and hold copies of messages on your machine for you to browse when you are not connected to the internet. Almost anyone with access to a news server can post messages to News Groups which will be copied to thousands of news servers around the world, and to millions of users. There are systems to limit off-topic and inflamatory posts. If you don't know about usenet or newsgroups, then you must find out more! It is the 'other' Internet. How to use Google Groups: Problem: Solution: Problem: Solution:
1) Search Engine: 2) Yahoo Directory: Problem: Solution: 3) Yahoo Supplied Resources
Alltheweb Problem: Solution: Searching for hops supplier (no Quotes) will give far more results. The results will be of a lower quality as there will be many, many pages containing the words hops and supplier without the pages actually referring to a hops supplier! Infoseek works in a similar way to Alltheweb. It searches the World Wide Web (Web pages) for links then follows the links to more pages, trying to index as much of the web as possible. This link is included to give a much more UK biased search than Alltheweb. The hops supplier example, which I used with Alltheweb, however, failed to give relevant results. Infoseek is more focussed than Alltheweb, but seems to have a much smaller database. This is probably the most intelligent search engine. It looks at the nature of the question you are posing. It will then try to give a context - sensitive result. With Askjeeves, you can either pose your question using keywords, or pose your question in ordinary language. For example, the query: Potato gives information on the origins, the herb, nutritional information and cooking links for potato. How do I cook potatoes? yields results almost exclusively around recipes for potatoes. A truly excellent result! Askjeeves is very good for ordinary questions. It will lead you to many very content-rich sites, not normally indexed by search engines like Alltheweb, Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista etc. Britannica.com- From the well known Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica was brought to the edge of bankruptcy recently by the massive scale distribution of the far cheaper (and inferior?) American- oriented Encarta encyclopedia on CD ROM. Britannica have (is I understand it) almost given up on the printed versions and put a lot of effort in their web operation. You can now get the fruits of the Britannica online- For free! (Sorry for gushing!) Their site gives Encyclopedia Britannica entries as well as researched web links to sites rated by Britannica. This site is possibly one of the best to start at when digging for classical knowledge (classical- General science, Religion, Politics, Geography, Medical etc.). The new Yellow Pages. Scoot is a search system to find virtually any business near you. Carpet shops, Takeaways, Mini cab companies, Builder's Merchants, Employment agencies, Plasterers (I have used it for all these!). You can enter either postcode or town name. Scoot will order the results with the closest businesses first. I think this is very clever. Something yell.co.uk should learn from! Other Scoot Searches: Go to Scoot's site to search by Company Name, like you would with Directory of Enquiries (192). Scoot people finder will give you access to over 17 million residential names and telephone numbers. The Scoot Cinema guide will list the nearest cinemas to you, the latest films and give a list of each cinema's services. The Scoot Product Finder gives a browsable directory of products, leading you through narrower indexes till you find the service/ dealer you need. Street maps for the whole of the UK? With each street named? With aerial photographs? Not quite.. but almost! London is covered completely. Most other areas are covered with a fair degree of accuracy. Most of London now seems to have aerial photographs. Brilliant! I use it almost every day! Speaks for itself. Up to the minute reporting with high standards and clean website design. Look up any word in the English language. Also search Roget's thesaurus to find other words with a similar meaning. Have a word on the tip of your tongue.. Know what it means.. but can't remember the word? Then check Roget's thesaurus! Almost as clever as Ask Jeeves, with a more 'search engine' angle. Gives many researched links to common words or enquiries. Looking for a picture for your web page? This is where to find one! Lycos Media will search the web or it's own collection of pictures. The results are presented as 'thumbnails'. I have not tried the sounds, movies and streams (probably streaming audio and video). I hope it is as clever as the picture search system! This probably needs most explanation. Webrings is a collection of Groups/ societies/ hobbyists. If you have a hobby, you should find like-minded people on webrings. Quotes in searches Suppose you were looking for a page about Star Wars- Phantom menace. Page A has the words "The phantom menace. All the links and information you want about the latest in the star wars series" Page B has the words "...discussing the beliefs in our study group about phantoms and ghouls" And further down the page "Do they find the noise of their neighbours a menace"" If you search for Phantom Menace without quotes, you will get results including A and B. If you look for "phantom menace" in quotes, most results will be about Star Wars Phantom Menace. Multisearch was first written by me, Nick Hill, as an answer to jumping through favorites and waiting for search pages to load. Multisearch is a real boon for modem users. If you save Multisearch to your computer and make it your home page, you no longer have to wait for the modem to connect to the Internet before you get your first page up, and entering your search queries! Version 1.7 was inspired from work carried out on my previous version, 1.6, by Andrew O. He heavily cut back the number of 'ordinary' search engines, improved the layout, and included some interesting searches such as Britannica and Webrings. I have carried the work forward into 1.7 by tidying the page up further and adding Dictionary, Streetmaps, Lycos Media, Guardian Online and Scoot. I have also established a web site for Multisearch. A home page is the first page your browser (Eg Opera, IE, Netscape) shows when starting up. The browser will normally give you the option of changing your home page. You will also have a button on your browser to take you to your home page. This is very useful! Your home page will normally have been set by your Internet Service Provider, Or browser company, to point to their corporate home page (In the case of Microsoft, msn.com, Netscape, netscape.com) when you installed your browser. Although these pages usually have lots of news and a search engine, they don't provide you with the everyday tools you need to find what YOU want. You will normally be provided with a search engine, normally supplied my Altavista or Infoseek, along with a relatively small directory. The corporate home pages are usually full of links and text, which although can take you to some very good sites, also makes the page cluttered and confusing! Why make Multisearch my Home Page?
How do I make Multisearch my home page? In Internet Explorer, go to
As Internet Explorer is by far the most common browser, I will give the instructions for this.
You now need to open the page from the file on your own machine before making Multisearch your home page.
The hardest question. Depends on many factors. The best way is to run through some examples. I want to a new account with an ISP. How do I find
out other peoples experience with them? I want to find a currency converter. I want to know the number of grams in an ounce. Where can I find a new exhaust for my car? A friend has moved to Pickhurst Rise, West Wickham.
How can I find it? I want to catch a train from Clapham to West Wickham.
What train route, connections and train times? I heard something about the RIP bill the other day.
I want to find out more. What does the word Irrelevant mean? How does an eye work? How can I find a picture of a rodent mouse? Where can I sell my car? How do I roast a turkey?
Copyright (c)2001 - 2005 Nicholas Hill. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
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