COMPUTER SPOT

Seek and ye may find
(if thou art a bit lucky)
by Phil Benjamin

There are now so many sites on the Web (a.k.a. the World Wide Web), each with so much information on it, that counting the pages has become futile. It rocketed into the billions years ago. Nowadays, to make use of the plethora of information out there and to get the best use of your time online, search skills have become compulsory. This is particularly true in the UK where a high proportion of internet users are still paying for each minute of their dial-up time, and relatively few users have taken up the new broadband option.

To find what you want on the internet, you need to use search engines. Don’t be put off by the technical name. The term ‘search engine’ is now used to denote a website whose raison d’être is to be very good at finding web sites for you. Yahoo!, for example, is a search engine that became a whole internet institution. Google, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves are all search engines too. You can think of a search engine as the Yellow Pages - they help you find what you want - so long as you know where to look.

These search engines trawl the internet looking at the words, links and titles of billions of web pages (it would be impossible to search every one, so they search as many of them as they can). They keep their own database of all this information and index it. When you search you actually search their database. The results, which have varying degrees of accuracy and success, are presented to you as a list of the sites that had matches to your search criteria. These lists are all ‘clickable’ (i.e. if you click your mouse on them, you will go to the site in question).

Clearly the computer power required by these search engines is monstrous, and so once they recovered from the shock of how popular they became they realized that they could make money by advertising, selling extra services, etc. We, as a planet, love them and wouldn’t be able to use the web effectively without them. In fact, we are now so in need of them, and the biggest names are making so much money, that there are now countless search engines on the internet. To get the most out of searching and to stop yourself going into information overload in the process, you need to understand what is available, and a little bit about how to use them effectively.

There are two main types of search - taxonomy searches (Yahoo! being the most famous) and free-text searches (AltaVista and Google being good examples).


Taxonomy Searches

Yahoo! started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" in February 1994. Jerry Yang, for the benefit of his fellow students at Stanford, decided to find all the web sites that he could, and then catalogue them according to their subject matter. By autumn of that year, his site was getting a million hits per day! You find what you are looking for by drilling down through the catalogue headings. For example, on the Yahoo! home page, you will see catalogue headings such as: ‘Business & Economy’ and ‘Computers and Internet’. Further down is ‘Health’. If you click on ‘Health’ you will come to the Yahoo!-defined headings associated with health. The first one is ‘Alternative Medicine’ and if you click on that, you will not, unfortunately, find Hypnotherapy.


So at a stroke you can see the strengths and weaknesses of this type of search.
You can find what you want easily and quickly if it is stored logically, but if it strays from what someone else deems the obvious path, it may not be so easy to find. However, when you do find Hypnotherapy, you will find a whole selection of useful sites that are of a higher degree of quality than you might find in the free-text searches we will look at in a moment.

[Hypnotherapy can be found at: Home - Business and Economy - Business to Business - Health Care - Mental Health - Training and Development - Hypnotherapy! Not quite where I would have thought to have looked.]

These searches are therefore very good for finding selections of proven sites devoted to a common theme.


Free-Text Searches

Supposing, however, that you want to find something very obscure. In this instance a free-text search will be your best option. Although Yahoo! includes one of these, the most famous is AltaVista, and the most popular currently is Google. (Google answers more than 150 million searches every day, and has indexed more than two billion web pages.) They use ‘web spiders’ to crawl around the web - hence their name - and send back anything and everything that they find. As there is little refinement of their searches you often have to sift out the junk, the porn, and the ‘get rich quick’ schemes from the results, but you can find virtually anything.


Efficient Searching

Here are some useful tricks to make your searching more efficient:

Use quote marks to group words together. If you search for stop smoking, you will find every page that has either the word ‘stop’ or ‘smoking’ in it, and that will be millions. By using “stop smoking” instead, you will only find pages that have the exact string.
Make words compulsory. If you want anything to do with dieting, related to hypnotherapy, then the word hypnotherapy has to be included but others may be optional. In AltaVista you can use the ‘+’ key to insist that that word be in your results, so you might type: +hypnotherapy diet food weight.
Exclude words. Sometimes searches are blighted because the words come up in another subject more often than your own. For instance, looking for hypnosis sites, one often finds stage hypnotism sites too. By excluding the word ‘stage’ you will have more success. On AltaVista, you do this with a ‘-‘ sign, e.g. +hypnosis -stage.
Put whole sentences. For the really obscure searches – type a whole phrase in quotes. For instance on Google I got eight hits for “How to set up my own website”.
Use date restrictions. For research articles, AltaVista’s advanced searching options allow you to restrict your search by date range.


Phil Benjamin PDCHyp, MBSCH is a clinical hypnotherapist and member of the LCCH faculty. However, he also provides a home computer support and education enterprise to small businesses.

On Wednesdays, he can normally be found in the LCCH office: call 020 7402 9037. At other times call him on 07771 561 224 or email: hypnotherapy@philbenjamin.com.
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