Part 3
Lab 2
Part 3
Before you learn how to search for information on the internet, let's look at how to do it in Windows NT. Although you can usually find all of the files you need with Windows Explorer, there will be times when you don't know a file's location, or even its name. Rather than forcing you to search every folder in Explorer, Windows has automated the search with the "Find" option in the Start Menu.
This should bring up a window which will ask for specific information about the file or folder you are looking for. If you know the name, then you can simply type it in, choose the drive where it is most likely to be located next to "Look in:" and press the button "Find Now".
After a few moments of searching, you should see a listing of "c:\winnt\notepad.exe". This means that the file was found in the "winnt" directory of your C drive.
Sometimes, however, you won't know exactly which file you are looking for. If you don't remember the name, but you know what time you created the file, you can use the section called "Date Modified" to narrow your search.
This should give you a pretty long list of files. Most of these are files that Windows changes or creates during the course of the day.
Finally, if the other options don't help, you can use "Advanced" to find files of particular types, sizes or content.
There should be at least a few files which are this large. Often, when you run out of disk space on your computer, this is a good way to find out which files are taking up much of the space. If your search didn't return any files, check to make sure that you have reset the options in the "Date Modified" section. (Otherwise it will be looking for files greater than 1000 Kb which have been modified in the last day.)
Just as it would be tedious for you to search every folder on your computer for a particular file, it is often time-consuming to search through many links for a particular Web site. Not only that, sometimes it's impossible!
Fortunately, several companies have developed search engines which can sift through millions of Web pages looking for the one you need. Some of them keep extensive catalogs of Web sites which are manually added (the human touch) and organized by category. These are less extensive, but much easier to use and produce much more meaningful results. Two very popular examples are Yahoo and Infoseek. Others simply visit every site they find and try to decipher and classify them digitally. These, called spiders or worms, are best for locating recent or obscure documents, but produce a lot more "noise" than the others (pages unrelated to what you were looking for). Lycos and Alta Vista are spiders. After using several sites for a while, one learns which search engines are better for specific things. For instance some will be better at looking for companies, while others may be better for searching for software.
Right-click on one of the search engine links above and select "Open in New Window".
This will bring you to that site in a new browser window so that you can still read these instructions in this one.
When it loads, you should see a text field (the white box) within the page that is used for entering search queries. Type in a few words describing your favorite hobby (Example: "baseball, cards, Babe Ruth") and click on the "Search" or "Go" button.
The words that you chose are called keywords and help the search engine determine which pages you will be most interested in. After a few moments, you should see a list of links to sites that are related to those keywords. Pages that contain all of them will be higher up than those that don't match as well. In general it is a good idea to try and use as unique a word as possible.
Spend some time searching with the above-mentioned search engines and exploring the pages you find. Try looking for information about your hobbies, things you'd like to buy, etc. Compare the results of Yahoo and Alta-Vista for the same search. Try looking through the categories provided in Yahoo, as well as the "Top 5% of the Web" in Lycos. Remember to copy the URL's of any sites which you think you would like to visit again when you create your own web page. At the end of the lab, you will transfer your list of interesting sites to your account so that you will be able to use it next week.
As an advanced feature, some engines allow you to construct queries using Boolean-type operators (eg. AND, OR, NOT). This makes it easier to make good searches. Say you are looking for a used car, but not a Toyota you could type something like "used and car and (not toyota)". The details of how to do such advanced searches different for each search engine. One search engine that allows you to construct queries in essentially the same way we have constructed Boolean logic expressions in class is Alta-Vista. Visit Alta Vista's help page for advanced search. When you have read the documentation, select "search" and then "advanced" and try out some queries that use Boolean operators. Try to create a very precise query that returns few documents, but useful documents. Save your best attempt and what was returned, i.e. copy the query you used, the number of matches, and the URLs of the first 5 documents returned. You will submit this to us along with your results of the treasure hunt. (Note that for a Boolean query in Alta Vista, documents are not ranked unless you give keywords as well as a Boolean expression.)
When you feel comfortable using search engines, move on to learn more about specific pages which might be useful in the Treasure Hunt (at the end of the lab).
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