suchmaschinen

[suereyya poyraz <poyraz_bEi_uni-duesseldorf.de>]

Hallo zusammen,
Ich fand die folgende Mail informative und leicht verstaendlich. Es handelt
sich um die "Intrnet-suche". Uebersichtlichkeitshalber lasse ich den Header
weg.
Lieben Gruss an alle
Suereya
 
(fwd)

>some will find this new, most will find it helpful but whatever you do,
>don't delete this message till you read at least the first screen unless
>you don't use the web

>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.
>
>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."
>
>