Where to find an answer

Sometimes the internet seems so huge and intimidating that it's difficult to find an answer to a seemly simple question. I know that sometimes I will type a question into a search engine and what I get back bears absolutely no relationship to what I wanted to find out.

Your average search engine is actually not a great way to get answers. What search engines do is search the entire internet for pages, then add them to a massive series of lists (I'm simplifying this quite a bit). Once they have the lists of pages, they break them down dozens of different ways to try and figure out what they are really about. Once they've done that, they perform some very interesting calculations to determine if the pages are spam - those are thrown away. Then the engines have to rank these pages so that you get "better" matches closer to the top of the list.

What you get with search engines is a great place to start looking for an answer - if you can boil the answer down to something usable by the engine. Sometimes you will find a question that works - type "what is the recipe for chicken noodle soup?" and you will get some great responses. Sometimes you will get junk.

The problem is that you are (a) depending upon the opinions of a piece of robot software to find what you need, and (b) you will only find things that have been already created and are in the search engine database.

What I usually do when I'm doing research is quickly try the major search engines (Google, Altavista, Lycos and Hotbot) to see what they pull up. Then I move to Yahoo. DMOZ (Netscape's directory) and Looksmart.

Yahoo, DMOZ, and Looksmart are directories, and the major different between directories and search engines is that directories are created by humans and search engines are put together by robots. I have found that directories tend to be much, much more on target than search engines for many areas of research.

Okay, you've checked out the major search engines and the directories - now what? The next step is to find the precise search engines and directories for your subject. You see, there are tens of thousands of these all over the internet. There are directories and search engines for medical data, legal information, technical journals, educational materials, and even adult photos and videos! How do you find these? An excellent place to start is Yahoo's Search Engines and Directories, which is a list of these things.

Now what do you do? It's time to move forward to more human editing and writing. There are many sites which include libraries of information created by people just like you and me. These include:

• Epinions.Com - A site with literally hundreds of thousands of opinions written by normal people about every conceivable product and service.
• Suite101.Com - A truly wonderful repository of columns on a huge variety of subjects.

Once you've looked over those sites, you have still more options. You can directly ask experts for an answer! Here are some places to check out:

• AskJeeves.Com - One of the first and the best of these kinds of sites. Ask your question and you may get an answer.
• Abuzz.Com - Ask your question or start a discussion!
• AskMe.Com - Another great resource.
• Exp.Com - Good resource, you post a question then people bid for answers. You select the bid you like and pay them for the data.
• InfoMarkets.Com - Another place to bid for answers.
• InfoRocket.Com - Yet another place to bid for answers.

Another great set of resources is newsgroups, ezines and elists (such as Egroups.Com). If you can find the right newsgroup, ezine or elist then you've got it made. Note that this can be a long and difficult search.

Themestream Comments

This is great, thank you. I use Google the most--it's easy to type in and very fast. Teraisa J. Goldman - getitinwriting 

Very relevant opinions on the difficulty of finding what one wants using search engines. But when using the Coperning freeware (available at: http://www.copernic.com), searches become so much easier and right to the point! Try it and you'll understand! - ricpoulin

This is excellent. Must sent it to my daughter who constantly complains that the net is too large and confusing to find anything. Jean Levack - jlevack

Excellent, Richard. I've bookmarked this to use as a reference tool. Thanks - bethaustin

Additional Information

• Be sure to submit your site to search engines Be sure to submit your web site to as many search engines as you can.
• Expressions Most search engines support expressions to make your searching more effective 
• Using search engines There are many hundreds of great search engines available on the net. Don't restrict yourself to just one - use whatever is appropriate for what you are doing.