From the web page:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/circuits/articles/03sear.html

Resources mentioned in this article can be found at:

Internet Sleuth:

http://www.isleuth.com/

Search Engine Watch:

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

To the best of my knowledge other resources follow the addressing
convention of www.sitename.com, where sitename refers to the name mentioned
in the article.

Kelly

Desperately Seeking Susan OR Suzie NOT Sushi
By MATT LAKE

If the World Wide Web ever adopted a theme song, it could do worse than
picking "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Searching the Web is
the most popular online activity -- and often the most frustrating. In
June, more than half of the top 10 most-visited domains were Web search
sites, according to an Internet metering service, Media Metrix. But how
many of the people visiting those sites found what they were looking for
right away?

 Not most, according to Karin Rex, whose Pennsylvania-based company
Computer Ease conducts Internet search classes. "Most people type in words
and get a bazillion hits," Ms. Rex said. "Some of the ones on the first
page may pertain to what they're looking for, but most of them won't."

On the surface, it ought to be simple. You're looking for Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, you enter those three words, and assuming it's
somewhere on the Internet (and that's a pretty safe assumption), the search
site gives you a list of relevant Web pages. Right? Not so, Ms. Rex said.

"You'll get sites about the Lincoln Continental and vacations in
Gettysburg, and real-estate sites listing addresses," she said, "but often,
nothing about Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."

Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch newsletter, agrees. His
publication and Web site monitorthe world of Web searching, and despite
improvements over the past two years, he said, he still sees problems.

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To search the web successfully, pick the right engine and learn how to use
it.

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"They've gotten better, faster and easier to use, but search engines have
got a long way to go," Sullivan said. "They're poor for people who are
doing really basic searches. Enter 'Disney' or 'travel,' and it's a
crapshoot whether they'll get the Disney site or any good travel sites."

One search site could provide 10 top results of pure gold, while another
serves up either nothing or dross. Why is there a difference in results?
Because there are three basic components of all search engines, and while
there is often a lot of overlap, no two engines are exactly the same. One
element is the index of Web sites or Web pages that your search roots
through; each search site collects its information and updates its database
differently. Each site's search function works differently, too, and the
order in which the results are sorted is usually based on a proprietary
algorithm that no company would be willing to share.

 To make things harder, search sites generally do not do a good job of
explaining how they work. Few people understand, for example, that Yahoo is
fundamentally different from search sites like Hotbot, Alta Vista and
Infoseek. Yahoo is not really a search engine but rather a Web directory,
compiled by humans who classify Web sites under headings. The others are
Web search engines, which use software agents called crawlers or spiders to
index the contents of individual Web pages, then follow links to other pages.

Web directories like Yahoo and Web search engines may look the same, but
each type of site is good for finding different types of information.

The first step in creating more effective searches is picking the right
search site for the job. "If people are doing a general search," Sullivan
said, "they should start off at Yahoo or a Yahoo-like directory like Snap
or Look Smart." A directory-style search provides two ways to research
broad topics: dive through a list of broad topics by clicking on the
appropriate links or fill out a search box to find listings.

But directory searches are less effective when looking for specific
information -- things like the author of a book, the complete text of the
Declaration of Independence or research on drug treatments for a medical
condition. For this kind of information, search engines like Hotbot and
Alta Vista are the way to go. Because they search an index of keywords
drawn by spiders from millions of Web pages, the chances are greater that
they will find obscure terms in obscure Web pages.

There's a third kind of search site, one that includes popular sites like
Metacrawler, Ask Jeeves and Dogpile. These sites -- also called metasearch
tools -- don't maintain any kind of index of their own but instead issue
search requests to fistfuls of other Web search sites. When Yahoo, Hotbot,
Alta Vista and the like return their results, the metasearch site collects
them onto a single Web page for display.

Because no two search sites index exactly the same set of Web pages,
metasearch tools give you a wider scope of results -- but it's worth
remembering that more does not necessarily equal better. What really counts
is relevant results that are sorted in a relevant order. And that's the rub.

Simply picking one of two or three types of sites to search from is no
guarantee of good results.

Brad Hill, the author of "World Wide Web Searching for Dummies" (IDG), says
most search sites deliver too much information. "Search engines do a good
job on indexing," he said. But because of that, they deliver more than you
want.

So when you're faced with several hundred thousand results over dozens of
pages, what should you do? "Don't go past the first page of results," Hill
said. "If it doesn't have something of interest, you've probably entered
the wrong search string."


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 Most people could get much more relevant results with a few simple tricks
for constructing a search "string" -- the words you enter in the search
box. The most obvious is to type in several relevant words instead of just
one or two. In general, the fewer words you enter, the more general your
results will be.

But not every search engine returns the most relevant results first --
which leads to lots of pages about Lincoln Continentals instead of
Lincoln's most famous speech. To give a search engine more instructions, it
helps to master a site's instructions, which search techies call "operators."

"Search operators tell a search engine how to interpret your key words,"

Hill said. "Words like 'and' or 'not,' and quotation marks can really
narrow down search results."

And it's narrowing the results -- giving fewer, better pages -- that really
counts.

"The simplest techniques, like using quotes around a phrase, help the most
people," Ms. Rex said. The result of slapping quotation marks around two or
more words is remarkable. Type in "Gettysburg Address," with quotation
marks, and you tell the search engine to look for a phrase instead of two
separate words -- knocking irrelevant vacation sites and real-estate
listings out of your top 20 results.

That trick works in many search sites, including Yahoo, Alta Vista, Hotbot,
Excite and Infoseek.

Not all search sites use the same rules for making better searches. Most
will let you exclude some terms from your results -- which is great if
you're trying to search for, say, the gross national product of Jordan and
keep getting sports sites about Michael Jordan. Exclude the word Michael,
and you'll trim a few hundred thousand irrelevant results right away.

But how you exclude words from a search depends on the search site. In the
regular search forms at Yahoo, Excite and Alta Vista, for example, you put
a minus sign before the word (-Michael). But in Hotbot, you click on the
More Search Options button and select Must Not Contain in the Word Filter
section.

It is hardly surprising that many people find Web searching confusing and
inefficient. So how are you supposed to know which rules apply to which
search site? Karin Rex includes a simple piece of advice in lesson one of
her Internet search class.

"Read the instructions," she said. "The only way to learn the inner
workings of each site is to read the help files or frequently asked
questions document. Most people don't even realize there are help files, so
they'll never be able to take advantage of advanced features."

Sage advice though this is, search sites tend to use jargon that's not
easily understood by the uninitiated. A single mention of Boolean operators
is enough to send many would-be searchers into a tailspin. (Named for a
19th-century British mathematician, George Boole, Boolean operators are
words like AND, OR and NOT that many advanced search sites use to make
searches more precise.) But in truth, Boolean logic is not hard to learn --
and in many cases, search sites label it with easy-to-understand phrasing
like "search for ANY of these terms" or "search for these terms as a phrase."

There are options for sufferers of Boolean anxiety, though. One site with a
novel approach is Ask Jeeves. When you enter a vague query, Ask Jeeves will
throw back a series of questions. From the single-word query "travel," for
example, it comes back with 10 possible interpretations of what you might
be looking for, including "Where can I rent a cellular phone in a foreign
country?" and "Where can I get tourist information about foreign countries?"

Another approach is to reduce the scope of your search. Searching the
entire Web for a highly specialized piece of information isn't always the
best way. For one thing, many Web search engines index only Web pages in
HTML format, and many Web pages are generated from databases that search
engine spiders can't penetrate. To uncover information from these
databases, you usually need to use the search engine provided at the
database's Web site. There are literally thousands of these highly
specialized Web search tools across the Web.

So how can you find these specialized search tools? About 3,000 of them are
listed at Internet Sleuth in Yahoo-style directories. But unlike Yahoo's
directories, Internet Sleuth's include only searchable sites and include
the search form to issue a query right away.

No matter what advice you get, however, you discover the best search
techniques by experimenting. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch uses all
the major search sites frequently, and refuses to name his favorite site.
His reason?

"Judging the results is subjective," Sullivan said. "If your friend raves
about a site and you don't like it, try another. Use whatever you find
gives you the answers."