Professor Al Fichera
Introduction to the Internet
INFOSEEK Searching
Using the INFOSEEK (GO.com) Search Engine

Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) Now go.com, is primarily a search engine, but it also includes a directory of Infoseek Select sites, which the people at Infoseek have personally reviewed. To use the directory, click on the categories along the left edge of the Infoseek pages. (Because Infoseek’s directory is organized just like Yahoo! You can refer to the Yahoo! Page if you need help.)

If you capitalize the first letter of two or more adjacent keywords, Infoseek treats them as a single proper name. For example, Siamese Fighting Fish finds only 15 Web pages, all of which contain the name Siamese Fighting Fish, while siamese fighting fish finds 65,965 pages about everything from breeding Siamese cats to fighting world wars.

This page explains how to use Infoseek’s search engine and a cool feature called MapIt!

Steps:

  1. Infoseek assumes that you want to use its search engine to search the World Wide Web. If you instead want to search one of its directories of newsgroup messages, e-mail addresses, etc., make the desired selection in the drop-down list under the Search for Information About text box.
  2. Type your search criteria in the Search for Information About text box and click on the Seek Now button (or press Enter).
  3. In searches with more than one keyword, you can specify that a word has to appear in the search results by adding a plus sign directly before the word. For example, house +rabbit, returns pages that relate to houses and rabbits.
  4. To exclude a word from your search results, enter the word with a minus sign directly in front of it.
    • e.g., nirvana –music, returns pages that relate to the mental state and not the music group.
  5. If you want the keywords to be within 100 words of each other (in the same paragraph, for example), enclose them within square brackets [ ]. If the keywords are a phrase, meaning you want them to appear in the page in that exact order, enclose them within double quotes " " instead of brackets.
    • For example search for [sign language learn]
  6. The first page of the above search returns all three keywords, but they aren’t necessarily next to each other.
  7. The Infoseek Web site has a program called MapIt! that generates maps on the fly for street addresses you enter. Click on Fast Facts button at the top of the Infoseek home page, and then click on Street Maps link.
  8. Infoseek display a form entitled Find a Street Map. Type the desired address in the text boxes, and click on the MapIt! button.
      (Note: you can use the Location Marker Label text box to enter a text label to accompany the red X on the generated map).
  9. In a minute or two, Infoseek displays a map with a red X marking the address you entered. You can change the scale of the map by clicking on the Zoom Out and Zoom In buttons. If you want to print the map, click on the Print toolbar button.
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