What they do for you is simple. You tell the search engine what you want and it retrieves it. This all happens faster than Scrappy Doo can get a Scooby snack. How does it all work, you ask? There are so many facets to this. One major part played in the retrieval of documents,is via the Damon robots. They do most of the work. Don't be frightened, there is nothing sadistic about "Damon robots". These robots, spend their entire existence searchingtheir domains (the Web) in its entirity. They are forever collecting and classifying new data,into specific word type categories. For example,say that you make a page about mushroom and black olive pizzas. You never register your new page though. That is okay because eventually the Damon robots will find your page and put it in a index system. Your page can be found under pizzas, mushrooms, black olives or any other key words found in your text. How is that for convenience? The concept of Damon robots has major implications. Future generations may be quite spoiled. They will probably never have to spend all day in a library, looking up information. That is unless they don't trust the way the information has been organized. It should be a time saver and cut down on tedious eye-crossing work. Just imagine what this really means. Now your research will take minutes compared to hours. You can pack your documents that you received from the Internet and go to the beach to review them. This would be a nice alternative, to spending all day at the library with dusty, moldy, old books. This is especially true for those of us that have allergies. There is more than one type of search engine. In fact there are many. The main ones at this point are Lycos, Infoseek, Magellen, Yahoo and Excite. My favorite is Alta Vista. Each search engine works a little differently. You can get more information on this by looking at the tips section when you are prepareing to use a specific engine. I suggest this because search engines are being updated, for the better all of the time.
The concept is still pretty easy. However, I suppose it varies from one unexperienced user to the next. First, are you the type of person, who learns from your own experience, regardless of the advice of your friends, teachers or family members? In general you ignore people who have a clue to what is going on. If so, you are the type that regardless of what I say, will just try it using your own methods of trial and error. Therefore there is really no point in you reading any further. In fact I would be real suprised if you were still reading. Just try it yourself and eventually you will probably get it in perspective. Although this is brave and admirable it may be more stressful. So just in case, you should go to the top of your screen, find the "bookmarks" icon click on it and then click on "add a bookmark". Then you can refer back to my page later. If you would like to learn though my humble and sometimes bleak experiences, don't click that moussy. Those of you still with me prepare to save some time. Here is what happened to me, when I first used a Web search engine. I called up Net Search and then the long list of choices came before me. Which one to choose? Lycos, Infoseek, yahoo, Magellen, Excite (On top of that, I have found at least 50 others outside my main server.) Anyway, I was confused about which one to pick. I picked Yahoo because it sounded cool. I never use Yahoo anymore. It didn't find what I wanted, it was too broad in it's search. What happened was I went looking for jellyfish pictures on Yahoo. A long list of hits came up. The first one I clicked on ended up being a Prophalactic page with pictures (k.y. jelly included). I didn't see any sea creatures at all. I then enjoyed a small level of mortification as I looked around shyly in the lab. I was trying to gauge, how perverted everyone in the lab thought that I was. I clicked off fast and convinced my self that none of my classmates caught me in the act. I have since found out from being in Dr. James' class that Yahoo uses only approved categories, not keywords like most other search engines. No wonder it doesn't work very well. My favorite searchers are Infoseek and Lycos and Alta Vista. They are pretty word specific and find things somewhat quickly. I like Lycos because it gives a search option. It will find sounds, pictures, people and in your desired category. Others do this too but, I just like how you check off what you want. Infoseek is cool because you can narrow your target with ultraseek. Alta Vista is my favorite so far. When you go to look something up like Surfing you can exclude Wind Surfing. This way you don't get hits on all of these extra documents that you don't care about. Alta Vista is very specific.
Here are three search engines that you can access directly from my page. They are quite different from one another. Each one works in its own way. First on my page is Yahoo. To tell you the truth I am not that fond of this one. It is good if you know what you are looking for. If it fits neatly into a category. In fact that is how it works. When you go to registar your home page with Yahoo, you must insert it into a predesignated catagory. It is easy to see where there would be complications. For example Dr. James has many articles on Traffic Psychology. Unfortunately there is really no place at this time for him to submit his work. This is because Traffic Psychology is not a predesignated category. However, I have heard that Yahoo is adapting to this dilemma. Next there is Lycos. I believe Lycos is one of my favorites. I use it often and it works swiftly. I particularly enjoy how segmented it is. If you are looking for pictures You can find them quickly with Lycos. It will only bring up what you want and shuck the rest. It is a big time saver. The last search engine that I have is Excite. Excite is a really interesting critter. It almost knows how to think. This is how it works. Excite sends out robots that search all documents. It learns words in web sites and what words relate to them. The example given by Excite is the following:"So when you search for"dog care", Excite knows that "pet grooming" is a related topic and finds pages about this as well, even if the words "dog" and "care" are not actually on the page! Excite is the only search engine to do this." When it finds new words and subjects as they arrive online, it learns those too. That is pretty amazing to me. Don't take my advice though. By the time you read all this these might be totally different. So in that light the best thing to do is try it for yourself.
I wanted to see what I could find about Cyber-Psychology. First I went to Excite. I did the basic search thing. I found a new page on Cyber-psychology Well at least it was new to me. I found a lot of irrelevent things as well. A real good example would be the man's magazine. The Cyber-Psych page was pretty groovy. I have to admit I have seen this one before. I did not find any Dr. James or U.H.M. info though. At least not on the first page. Then I tried Yahoo. I was not expecting much. I didn't get much either. I did find one Cyber-Shrink page. I guess with that one there are a whole slew of Doctors at your disposal. This Cyber-Psych-Link page is a new one. It seems noteworthy of a looksee. Lastly I used Lycos. As usual Lycos impressed my by straining out the blechy stuff. Finally some pages from Dr.James. Guess what though, when I clicked on it, I got a file not found. I suppose you should resubmit that Dr. James. The other pages were some of the ones I listed above. They were pages that were relevant to my search. That is exactly what I like about Lycos, they trim the fat so you can save your eyes.
What I learned about search engines.
The most prominate thing that comes to mind is that there are so many out there. I have only scratched the surface and I am sure there will be plenty of new editions. I learned how to get what I want faster by reading the tips section. This tells how the service can be better accessed. It also brings to attenion the updates to the system. I have learned legions compared to where I started. I suspect that if I don't make a conscious effort to keep up with the changes, I will lose out, bigtime. One of my biggest thrills about search engines. One of my professors actually asked ME what search engines I liked and why, the other day. That makes me feel kinda special. I got warm fuzzies.
I have learned so much. My greatest insights are about the Web. It is such a vast Levithan of information. So deep that you can practically O.D. on all of it. I have a feeling of pride of what I have done and learned. I know I have come a long way. Yet I am never really satisfied with my work. There are so many adjustments I want to do to my documents. I think that I am possessed by Barbra Striesand. I am so particular about how I want to present my self on the Web. Oh well. I have made the greatest strides with learning the Html language. I think that it is good that we had to, instead of doing the Netscape "instant oatmeal" gold program. This means I know it inside out. Being an insider is good it gives you power. In regard to my online personality. I don't think I learned much about who I really am this semester. What I mean is the things I did were not directly fueled by me. I realize that I need direction yet I was not really free to be myself. This is not about my home page. It is about how I interacted online. I would say I was about 50% me. That drained time from the purpose of this class though. My main goal was to do well in the class not to feed my side interests. That is okay because now I know the best ways to go about getting the information I want. The best part is that there will always be time for me to get it. I think that I represented my self well online in the home page setting. People that know me are aware that I am kind of loud and so is my work. I have no apologies,I don't have to. Why is that you ask? It is because I am senior on the verge of being harvested. Yes, you may hear me roar.
