Creating Web Pages (continued) (Nov 99)
To use their search function you type in a word or group of words the dialog box and then hit the FIND or SEARCH BUTTON in order to find sites you are looking for. Let’s say you want to find a website with the midi music tune
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, by Billy Joel
You could type in the following in Alta Vista
The page we want would be listed among 30266 other listings of websites where the search engine would have found italian restaurant
Obviously we have to get more specific.
italian restaurant would provide various results on different Search Engines. (SE’s)
Some SE’s would locate occurrences of "italian" OR "restaurant" while others like Alta Vista assume "italian" AND "restaurant"
In order to force it to find a phrase rather than a group of separate words you would use "Boolean Algebra" For example...
or the following
This forces the SE’s to find only occurrences that include all of these words.
This is not as good as searching by including in QUOTES however as the above would locate the words in any order. So...
"italian restaurant" is usually more effective.
You could also narrow the search by including other information.
"italian restaurant" + "billy joel"
returns 8780 pages but in checking some of these I find no midi file of that song within the first few pages of results.
"italian restaurant" + "billy joel" + .mid
returns 1377 pages but this finally does the trick by listing sites that have Billy Joel Midi’s. By clicking on a few of these, the song "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel is quickly found.
Boolean Algebra operators you can use are AND OR NOT
Note that they do not have to be capitalized.
Search Engines are made to speed up your search for information, don’t be affraid to use them.
Well, that’s it for this month’s installment. Let me know what you’d like to see in the next MILLENIUM.
You can reach me at webeditor@wpcug.com
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