One of the most common activities on the browser is doing searches.
There are a number of search engines you can use. Each of these is a website.
| Name | URL | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| www.google.com | This is currently the most popular search engine. Google offers many other services, such as maps and email (Gmail). They seem to have the best maps. | |
| Bing | www.bing.com | An alternative to Google, operated by Microsoft. There are many other services, including maps and email (Hotmail). One of the best services is "Bing411" which allows you to look up telephone numbers, and it works on your cell phone. No more paying 99 cents every time you call information on your cell phone. This is part of the Bing site but can be reached by phone by calling 1-800-bing411. |
| Yahoo | www.yahoo.com | This was once the most popular search engine, but in recent years it has declined in popularity. It was cool when it was noncommercial and run by grad students from Stanford, but lost a lot of coolness when it apparently got taken over by guys in suits from ATT/Pac Bell. |
To do a search you have to consult one of these websites. Your web browser may have a facility to forward searches to one of the Search engines automatically, but there is still a website doing the search. You sometimes hear about people who are typing their questions "into the internet". This is nonsense. The internet is a network of computers and you can't type into it. You need to consult a specific search engine and enter your search there.
The most basic search is to type the name of the thing you are looking for in the search box.
For my first search I am going to look for the famous composer PDQ Bach. So, I will go to the Google website and see what I can find.
Before I could even finish typing my search, I started getting answers. Right away, I see three sites that talk about PDQ Bach. The first two are sites that belong to the performer Peter Shickele, and the third one is a Wikipedia article.
Let's try the same search on Bing. I will go to that site and type my search again.
The answers we get are pretty much the same as with Google.
When you do a search you want to choose good search terms. The search engines do word matching. They don't understand English. They don't know what you are trying to ask. So what you do is try to figure out what keywords will locate the document you want to find.
Let's say you want to find the birthday of George Washington. You would search for "birthday george washington". You would not type a full English language question into the web browser.
There's another reason you don't type questions into a search. Adding extra words causes false positives, which are pages you don't want in your search results. Remember, it's doing word matching. So if you look for "What is the birthday of George Washington" it will respond with all pages that have the word "What" and all pages that have the word "is" and all pages with "the" or "of". It will return with millions of pages that have nothing to do with what we are looking for.
So, keep your list of keywords short and specific so that you get useful results and avoid confusing the computer. Avoid false positives.
To summarize our searches:
birthday george washington | good search terms |
What is George Washington's birthday? | bad search |
You might actually get the right answer with the second search but the first one is the right way to do it.
Every quarter we will have a few students who insist on typing their questions "into the internet". It is unfortunate so see that many people completely do not understand how the search thing works. They may occasionally get right answers by accident, but if you understand how things work, you can get better answers, faster, with less irrelevant hits.
