Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) is one of the most well known search services on the Web. Two Ph.D. students at Stanford University who wanted to create a catalog of Web pages for the Stanford community founded it in 1994. News of Yahoo! spread rapidly and today people around the world rely on the service. Yahoo! has a team of 30 or so Web surfers who review and categorize new sites for their directory, and they also supply a search engine for searching Web documents based on keywords.

Yahoo! searches are not case-sensitive, if you want to change this or other search options, click on the Options link.

If Yahoo! doesn’t find any matches to your search criteria in its own database, it automatically searches Alta Vista and displays the results in the Yahoo! Page.

Steps:

1. To search the Yahoo! directory by category, begin by clicking on one of the main categories listed in Yahoo!’s home page.
2. Yahoo! displays a list of subcategories and/or sites. Continue clicking on subcategories until you see one you want to explore. If you want to go up one level, click on the Back toolbar button.
3. Click on the link for a site you want to visit.
   • Select: Arts:Graphic Arts:Calligraphy category.
4. Netscape displays the site. If it’s one you think you’ll want to return to bookmark it. To return to Yahoo!, click on the Back toolbar button.
5. To use the search engine, type the keywords in the Search text box (at the top of every Yahoo! directory page), choose one of the two options buttons under the text box to define the scope of the search, and click on the Search button (or press Enter).
   • In the above example Yahoo! Will search the Arts category for Web pages that contain both the words islam and calligraphy.
6. Yahoo! displays a list of Web pages—and the categories they belong to—that match your search criteria.
   • The Web page site returned will be Islamic Architecture and Calligraphy, which is are cross-referenced categories.
7. By default, Yahoo! looks for Web pages whose title and content contain all your keywords. In addition, it treats keywords as sub-strings rather than the complete words, looking for words that contain the keyword but may include additional characters as well. (For example: islam also returned Islamic).
8. Yahoo! displays a relatively simple set of options for customizing your searches. You can choose the Usenet or E-mail Addresses option button if you want Yahoo! to search for newsgroup messages or E-mail addresses instead of Web sites.
9. Choose the option button labeled At Least One of the Keys if you want to broaden your search to include sites containing at least one (but not necessarily all) of your keywords.
10. Choose the Complete Words option button if you want to restrict your search results to sites that contain the exact keywords you type.

Back to TOC     Back to Searching