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Navigating the Internet

Searching

Search engines

Content in the Internet can be located through the so-called search engines. Each has built a catalogue of Universal Resource Locators (URLs) that can be retrieved through queries. Whatever the engine being used, one has to bear in mind that the results of a search will depend both on minor details of search strategy and, most important, on the engine's own database; this means that the "best" one is a nonsense, and not finding something with one particular engine should encourage switching to another, or using one of the resourceful meta-searchers (see below). If you visit Search Engine Watch you might be able to learn which one suits best for your momentary purpose, as does ZDNet and especially the very thoughtful Sherlock. My own version of a guide such as the one by SEW comes below.

Do not expect all search results to be accessible: many links (older and not-so-old either) are dead but were not erased from the catalogues! On this and many other aspects the World Wide Web FAQ's should not be missed.

A few others that do not have the same power but have an edge of their own that you might enjoy: About might look as familiar as the city-hall library and it relates to the all-in-one SearchBug page, while Disinfo is definitely non-mainstream (in case you look for stuff that might be banned from regular search engines). Langenberg provides for the alternating use of different search engines, dictionaries, references, yellow pages, products, etc., all from one page. To search by countries, EmulateMe is designed for that. The countries flags, good quality maps, detailed informations, and a search engine all included.

Meta-searchers (metacrawlers)

These manage to do the search combining several (or many!) different engines, so that the weaknesses are cancelled and the strengths reinforced. But the duplicates come frequently as well, therefore an optimization of the results is vital. At Snooz one can find 6 rules about the performance of meta-searchers.

WebRings

A Webring is a different way of searching the Internet and getting great downloads. Each ring organizes and gives quick access to web pages that are related with each other under a given theme, for example wallpapers. Once a visitor gets into any page of a ring, the opportunity is set for connecting to dozens, sometimes thousands of other pages of the same ring, to which the jump can be either sequential or random. The visitor can go on for hours (notwithstanding the swiftness of all jumps) delighted with the contents displayed by each member of the ring. Myself, I was amazed with the very few visits I could make, and I can do little better than recommend the webring way of life.

This section is just beginning to be filled with nice suggestions. Here goes the first bunch:

Have fun!

Software

There are programmes that do metasearching without the resource cost of opening browser windows. Some will even package the results into HTML pages that can be stored for later use.

Bull's Eye and Bingooo can be used as freeware. WebFerret, WebSearch and Copernic come as a free limited (or "standard") edition and a licenseable full (or "deluxe") edition. All free editions are fine for most purposes, see for example the case with Copernic.

Of course, one must not ommit the powerful Peer-to-peer strategy. There is the centralised searching pioneered by Napster and now expanded by WinMX and others to allow searching for executables, video, images, etc., versus the decentralised Gnutella network that has done this from the start and can be quite effective.

Portugal Wide Web

Please note that, except where indicated, these sites are in Portuguese only.