psy409 Report 2:First Attempt at Learning to Use Web Search Engines: <br> Alta Vista

Report 2:
First Attempt at Learning to Use Web Search Engines:Alta Vista

Artemio Baxa II
Psy 409:Cyber Psychology
University of Hawaii Summer '96

CONTENTS
Introduction A Peak Into Alta Vista Searching For Dating Tips in Alta Vista Dating Tips Using Alta Vista Quantitative Evaluation

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Introduction

For all you guys and gals out there, here's a question to make you reminice. Have you ever gone to the beach, a night club, a gym, or a shopping mall, and saw the most gorgeously stunning woman or buffed out hunk your eyes have ever had the privledge to grace upon? If you have, remember the way you felt when both your eyes met for a split second and the urge you had to go up to them and profess your attraction and say, "Take me. I'm yours!!!" But what happened? You chickened out because all kinds of negative thoughts crawled into your mind like, "She'll never go for a guy like me.", "What do I say to him? I'm so shy!", or "I probably have a huge booger in my nose and she'll see it!" LOSER! Well, we probably all had these kinds of feeling and thoughts once in our lifetimes (okay, maybe not the booger one) so we're all in the same boat. So, the question is, do you want to keep on missing out on the best of life and staying home on Friday nights playing Nintendo or washing your hair? I hope not!! But then you say, "I don't know what to do. I'm not good at playing the dating." Well dude or dudette, maybe the internet can help! If you may be interested, READ ON.

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A Peak into Alta Vista

An amazing search engine to find such a topic as "dating tips" is Alta Vista which address is http://altavista.digital.com. This is the first time I have used this search engine, so I'm pretty excited to see what's in store for me. My friend Eva Garcia was also using it and told me a friend of her's said it was an excellent search engine to use. The first thing I did was get familiar with the search engine's main page. I scrolled up and down looking for interesting or helpful links. There was a brief description of itself:

Largest Web Index with 30 million pages found on 225,000 servers. 3 million articles from 14,000 usnet news groups. Accessed 12 million times per weekday.

That's pretty amazing,huh? I was impressed with what it said, so it must be good search engine to use. I then went on to click on some links to see what they had to offer. I clicked on "Alta Vista" on the bottom of the page. It linked me to a page that briefly described Alta Vista's creation and short history. I found out that it was conceived in the summer of 1995 at Digital Research Labratories in Palo Alto, California. I then clicked on "tips" which was also on the bottom. When the page came up on the screen, I read some pretty interesting things that could help me with my searches and using the Web in general. It gave me tips like:

If you use Alta Vista a lot, you can "steal it". What it means by this is that you can access Alta Vista faster if you cut and past it on your home page. It then follows with a smaller version of the search engine which you can put on your home page. It also has a short view source document which you can copy down if you want to.
You can also use Alta Vista as a spelling or usage check.
You can also take out common words like http and com to speed up your search.

I also clicked on "Digital Menu". Under Roundtable, it has a couple of links. One is "Share Alta Vista Stories". This link permits users like you and I to give people some individual information that we found using the search engine. For example, if you found someone or something of interest, you can send it through this link so that othres can view it also.

At the top of the page, I clicked on the "help" button. It gives information on using either the Advanced Search or the Simple Search which I will talk about later. Under Advanced Search, it gives some help by suggesting that you use words called binary operators which make your searches easier or more specific.

NOT: When used in a search, this word excludes certain items from the search. For example, if you type out "vegetable NOT brussel sprouts", the search engine will look for all files about vegetables except those with brussel sprouts in the title.
NEAR: This is a "sorta" kind of word. If you do not really know what you are looking for but you "sorta" know about it, use this binary operator. For example, if you type in "NEAR Leon James" it will also look for other files that are close to what you typed in. So you may get results like "Leon S. James" or "Leon D. James".
AND

Using this operator makes sure that whatever you search, such as "Kayak AND San Juan Isalands" will only look for files that contain both kayak and San Juan Islands.

Under the Surprise link at the top of the page, I found a page that lets you choose from a number of preselected searches. Some of the stuff on it were Art, Elvis Presley Sightings, Museums, Sports, Comics, Weather, and a whole lot of other stuff. If you click on any one of these items, the search engine will randomly select matches in the category. The engine says that this option is for the browser to allow him or herself acces to places in the Web they never would have suspected existed, so they provide random jumps.

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Searching for Dating Tips Using Alta Vista

Now to the good stuff!!! Dating in the 90's is a topic almost every normal single person can relate to. However, dating is a skill and like all other skills in life, some people are better than others. Now if the skill of dating is anywhere like the skills of basket ball or dancing, most people will not be as able in the dating game as Michael Jordon or Mikahail Baryshnakov are in their respected skills. A lot of people have no idea how to act in these kinds of situations. Also, some people think dating is just getting a phone number, calling someone up, going out to the movies, and then placing a kiss on each other when the night is done, but it's more complex than a,b,c...1,2,3. It's a complicated process of impression management in trying to portray yourself in the best light but not appearing to be arrogant or fake, controlling both verbal and nonverbal behaviors, perceiving the other's action, adapting to the physical and social context, and going from small talk to careful self discloing. Dating is also shrouded in mystery and myth, making dating more complicated and confusing.

To find a remedy for this, I entered the words tips dating in the Alta Vista search window. I picked the words "tips" and "dating" because of their simplicity. They are words that are self explanitory, so when I was zoning in class one day (of course it wasn't Dr. Leon James' Psychology 409 class, heh, heh)they popped into my head because everyone is always trying to give tips and advice about the dating world. Speaking of advice, another variation of the words I proposed to type in the search window is "dating advice". I played around and typed "advice dating" on the screen and searched them. What I got was a lot of advertisements for books and telephone numbers for advice which I didn't really want to view. I wanted information to read to and explore on the internet. So I stuck with the words, "tips dating". I am confident that these words will work out great because they are so simple yet direct in their meaning.

My plan is to first click on the "search" button. If the results I get are appropriately matched to what I am looking for, I will then scroll up and down the first couple of screens and check out the variety in my results. If I find somehting interesting to me or something that corresponds to my search words, I will also click on them and see what they have to offer. If these individual reports on the internet are of good quality, I predicet that they will have a lot of other links I can go to and click on to find related information. If, for some reason, I find nothing or I find items unrelated to my topic, all I have to do is think up some other words that are more specific to my topic to narrow down my search.

For my search, I used the simple search option. Under this option I could have used the Compact Form in which the results do not offer a general description of the file. It only gives the title and the corresponding address, so I stuck with the standard form which is the same as the Simple Search.

Unlike using the internet for the first time, which was really frustrating for me, using this particular search engine was relatively easy. The only thing that was frustrating was coming up with words to search on. Other than that, I felt extremely confident in what I was doing. I attribute whis confidence to the ease of using this search engine. I did not ever have to read any directions to use it. It was just like using a computer at the library to find a certain book, only it was easier, faster, and more fun to use. All I had to do was click, click, click and I found what I needed.

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