FEATURE	 INTERNET SEARCHING                     second draft for Mar 2005? Computer Bits

A Web Search Toolbox :  Just go ask Wally (wa.lii.org)
	Batman has a utility belt full of tools and so should you…By Richard I. Garber 

Research on the World Wide Web is one good tool for finding information.  However, there are good and bad ways to do research.  The good ways involve having both a whole box of tools and several strategies in mind. This article will discuss a very useful toolbox.
An average user often tries just one tool for searching - the search box on the home page from the Internet service provider.  First the user puts a two or three word phrase into the search box.  Then he or she looks at the first page of results, tries again a few more times, and within ten minutes gets fed up and quits. If all you have is a hammer, then you start to treat everything as a nail.
What you really need is a web page that is a whole toolbox for finding things. How about fifteen different starting points for searching that have been selected and are updated by real people without a commercial ax to grind?  There is such a page, and its name is wa.lii (pronounced Wally).  

Who’s Wally?
Now, you probably have heard of both Google and Yahoo! but who or what is wa.lli?  It is not advertised on TV because it is not a commercial website.  Wa.lii is the Librarian’s Index to the Internet for the State of Washington, with a home page of http://wa.lii.org.  There also is the original California version at http://lii.org. Both have almost the same information, but their layouts are just slightly different. The California version has a main heading of Regional that begins with California (of course); the Washington version has main heading of Places In The World that begins with Washington State. Under What’s New, the Washington State version has an item for "New this week for Washington State". Sorry, but there is no Oregon version yet. 

Opening the Toolbox
From the lii or wa.lii home page, just click on  “More Search Tools” at the upper right corner of the page.  Then bookmark it or add it to your favorites.  Right now the More Search Tools page has four large search tools (Google, Yahoo!, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves).  It also has two metasearch engines (Vivismo and Ixquick), four news search engines, and five library-based search tools (lii and four others).   For most of these tools there are also Advanced Search pages you can and should look at until you are familiar with how each tool works.  

Large Search Tools
The large search tools are search engines. A search engine is an excellent tool for finding some kinds of information. Search engines work very well if you already know the right words to make a search phrase to describe the concept you want to find. If you don’t quite know the words you may have to fumble around until you can find them. 
Google, Yahoo, Teoma, and AskJeeves have Advanced Search pages that list a menu of useful options.  For example, suppose you’ve been talking with your relative Wanda from Warsaw and want to look up web sites about Polish furniture. If you just try typing the words polish furniture into Google, you will get almost the same half million results as if you had typed furniture polish, which is a very different concept. What you really needed was the exact phrase, and the Advanced Search page lets you directly enter that option to find just six thousand results. Some of you may already know that putting the exact phrase inside of quotes in the regular search box as “Polish Furniture” will have the same effect. You also could narrow things down further by limiting the domain name to web sites from Poland by specifying a .pl domain and get just about a hundred results. Obviously you could also do the reverse. If you were looking for sites in Vancouver, Washington rather than British Columbia you could say you did not want the .ca domain.
Another nifty Google and Yahoo option is limiting searching to file types other than regular hypertext (.html). Serious technical articles or data sheets often are in Acrobat (.pdf) or Word (.doc) files.  If you are looking for spreadsheets or presentations, then it is also very cool to be able to look just for Excel (.xls) or PowerPoint (.ppt) files.

Metasearch Engines
Metasearch engines like Vivismo and Ixquick send your search to several different search engines. Then they put together and organize the results. This process can help you get a broader search, since no one search engine can completely covers the web. Metasearch engines should be used in addition to the large search tools. Metasearch engines can miss things you can find by knowing the details of using a particular search engine. They also may wind up feeding you mostly sponsored web pages, which is the price you pay for the convenience of using their single starting point.

News Search Engines
Despite appearances a search engine is not directly searching the web. Actually it is looking at an index prepared by crawling the web. That index could be days to weeks old.  To find more recent information you need to use one of the four news search engines, which are currently Google News, Yahoo News, Topix, and Daypop.   

	Library based search tools
There are five library based search tools: the Librarian’s Index to the Internet,  INFOMINE, BUBL, the Internet Public Library, and KidsClick. Naturally they put LII at the top of the page. 
These five subject directories are a different way to narrow down and find a topic either starting from a keyword search or by browsing a list of categories. These tools are selective catalogs- librarians built them by putting together and organizing lists of about ten thousand good places to find out stuff. You can think of them as labeled trees with increasingly specific smaller branches.  Before you can effectively use a subject directory you need to be familiar with the category names used by the catalogers, so you might need to look in an encyclopedia first.      

For More Information
At the bottom of the More Search Tools page is a link to an Infopeople page with a cheat sheet (reference chart) describing most of the tools. That page links to a Best Search Engines Quick Guide page that compares Google, Yahoo, and Teoma. 

Sharpen Your Tools
A toolbox with fifteen different tools certainly beats having just one. For each tool you can look at the Advanced Search or Help page to tweak your search or learn more about how that tool works.   For some tools you also can set preferences to fit your style and circumstances. On the Google Preferences page you can set the number of results to display up to a hundred rather than the default of ten, so you can spend less time looking at ads. Also, you can set each results site to open as a new browser window, so those thoughtless page designers who didn’t give you a way to use the back key do not slow you down.   

Other Places to Look
There also actually are large subject directories on both Yahoo and Google. In fact, ten years ago Yahoo started out just as a directory, but it grew to where you have to scroll down the page to even find that one feature.  Google has a directory, but not on the home page; it is hidden away under “More stuff”.  Each of these directories has a couple million entries. About.com is another useful large commercial directory site.
A great place to find out even more about searching is “Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial” from the teaching library at the University of California Berkeley -
www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html
An excellent older book on searching is Reva Basch and Mary Ellen Bate’s RESEARCHING ONLINE FOR DUMMIES, 2nd edition, 2000.  There also are entire books covering just Google. One is Tara Calishan and Rael Dornfest’s GOOGLE HACKS: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, 2003.

Richard I. Garber PhD, PE is a metallurgical engineer living in Portland, Oregon. He solves materials related problems with products and components and has been looking up information for over thirty years. Email him with your comments at r_i_garber@hotmail.com