Finding Stuff on the Web

The Help Page

Google Groups[TM] Searching Newsgroups

Internet newsgroups are electronic forums for discussion on just about every subject under the sun. Google collects postings to these newgroups, provides a search capability and allows you to post your own updates to newsgroups. In the template provided, alt.animals.whales is the name of an Internet newsgroup. If you want to see the latest activity for a specific newsgroup, you can type your own newsgroup over alt.animals.whales and press Enter. A good source for more information is The Google Groups Help Page.

You can also go to the All about Google page or the Google cheat sheet page for more information about other features of Google. Google Weblog has news about what's new with Google. Soople helps you use Google advanced features. The Google features page has additional information on Google features.

If you want to find a fairly comprehensive inventory of Internet newsgroups, go to tile.net/lists.

HotBot - Search the Web

HotBot allows you to search Web pages for information on specific topics. If you specify more than one word, the default is to search for entries which contain all the words. If you click on the button to the left of the field containing the words all the words, you can change to search for any of the words or the exact phrase. For more help, check out the HotBot Help pages.

Meta-Crawler - Search & Collate

Meta-Crawler searches a number of Internet search engines - Excite, AltaVista, Webcrawler, Yahoo!, and Lycos - and combines the results of this search.

There are also individual search forms for most of the individual search engines on the "Finding Stuff" pages.

Yahoo! People Search

Yahoo! People Search (formerly Four11) is a directory of Email addresses for the Web. It also contains phone numbers.

Other Search Engines

Where options such as all the words or the exact phrase are not present for a particular search engine, try

adding a plus sign (+) in front of words which must be present
putting double quotes around a phrase

When all else fails, check the Help page for the search engine!

Directories

Web Reference Tools here links to several specialized directories and directories of directories. For someone with a good grasp of the subject area, these can provide a more selective "hit list" faster.

In some cases, they may point to content which may not be found by more generalized search engines.

The Zen of Finding Stuff

Be patient. You will find a lot of stuff that you weren't looking for.
Be flexible. You may need to be more specific or more general in your search depending on what you find.
Be focused. Try to remember what your original objective was.
Be careful. Keep an open mind but don't believe everything you read! Consider the source.
If all else fails, consider other sources. All human knowledge isn't stored on the internet. Some important information is still only available in books.

For More Information

The second "Finding Stuff" page has even more search engines. The third "Finding Stuff" page has links links to other places on the Web that can help you find stuff. What's Where is an index to these "Finding Stuff" pages.

Some other good places for search engine info:

Check out the tutorials at: