i.howtosearchlikeapro.doc

I. HOW TO SEARCH LIKE A PRO What’s the Difference Between a Search Engine and a Directory? How do Search Engines Really Work? Learn Boolean Logic to Create the Best Search Strategies for Finding Relevant Documents Which Search Engines Are the Best? A Close Look at Google and Search Engines That “Think” Learn Browser Tricks – The Power of the “Find” function to Scan Web Pages Quickly Managing Bookmarks Effectively Using RSS Feeds, Blogs and Podcasts A. What’s the Difference Between a Search Engine and a Directory? In a nutshell: search engines are fully automated while directories have human editors. Search engines. Search engines are huge databases of web pages and other files that have been assembled automatically by machine. The databases are compiled by employing spiders or robots to crawl through web space from link to link. Once the spiders get to a web site, they typically index most of the words on the publicly available pages at the site. Web page owners also may submit their URLs to search engines for crawling and eventual inclusion in their databases. Whenever you search the web using a search engine, youre asking the engine to scan its index of sites and match your keywords and phrases with those in the texts of documents within the engines database. You are not searching the entire web as it exists at this moment. You are actually searching a portion of the web, captured in a fixed index created at an earlier date. Spiders regularly return to the web pages they index to look for changes. When changes occur, the index is updated to reflect the new information. The process of updating can take a while, depending upon how often the spiders make their rounds and then, how promptly the information they gather is added to the index. Until a page has been both spidered AND indexed, you wont be able to access the new information. While most search engine indexes are not up to the minute current, they have partnered with specialized news databases th