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Finding the Needle in the Cyber
Haystack The Web grew 80% in from 1999 to 2000! With more than 4 billion addressable web pages and 2.7 million added daily, the Web can be a very confusing place. It’s like trying to find a library book with all of the books on the floor. Fortunately, there is help out there. Search sites help make order out of this chaos. They are web sites that act as electronic card catalogs to help you find the information you want. Understanding how to use the different types of search sites will help you find your information "needle" in the "haystack" of cyberspace information. There are four major types:
Directories: Directories are catalogued by a team of human editors (cybrarians), in a manner similar to librarians in a library. The oldest and most popular directory on the web is Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). Pros: Directories are great for broad topics. You will get well-organized results. For example, searching on "CVB" will yield a neatly catalogued, alphabetized and hyperlinked list of 284 convention and visitors bureaus that have web sites. Cons: A directory site does not work as well for narrow, targeted searches. How to use: One of the best ways to use a directory is to "drill down" – using the opening page menu which lists many broad topics and progressively narrow it in successive screens by clicking on the subject you are looking for. For example, to find "Convention and Visitors Bureaus," the opening screen has a category of "Travel." Clicking on this will lead to a listing of "Convention and Visitors Bureaus" on the next page, then you can narrow it to bureaus in "U.S. Cities", and, finally you have "drilled down" an extensive, alphabetical list of the CVBs in the U.S. Robotic search engines: Robotic sites gather web information in an entirely different manner – they automatically search and catalogue web sites by using special indexing software programs. These programs automatically sort many components of a site including key words, introductory paragraphs, hidden codes, graphics and more. The major ones index 100 times more web pages than Yahoo does. Two of the best among the scores of robotic search engines are HotBot (www.hotbot.com) and AltaVista (www.altavista.com). Pros: These sites are the opposite of directories -- they are good for narrow, targeted searches. For example, if you are looking for web information regarding a person in the meetings industry, these are good sites to use. For example, typing in "Anna Lee Chabot" -- the current president of Meeting Professionals International – will yield more than a dozen references in HotBot or AltaVista. It is also possible to target searches by date, title, location, domain, Boolean (and/or/not) searches, and much more. [added Boolean explanation here] Cons: Robotic search engines are not as good for broad searches, often resulting in a huge number of responses in a seemingly random manner. Searching AltaVista for "meeting planning" with no filtering, you will produce more than 800,000 responses including all of the web sites that have mentioned the words "meeting" or "planning" in them. How to use: Go to these sites, click on the "help" or "advanced search" buttons, and learn how to use the advanced search options specific to each site. HotBot is especially user-friendly in helping you narrow down and find what you are looking for. Develop a favorite robotic search site and practice the advanced search options -- this is the key to finding narrow topics information! Meta search sites: Meta search sites "search the search sites." Typically they will check eight or more of the popular search sites simultaneously! These sites collate the results from many search sites onto one screen. MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com) is great for quick basic searches and ProFusion (www.profusion.com) provides more customizing features. A great new site, requiring a software download, replaces the existing search function in Internet Explorer, provides very powerful and directed search tools: Copernic (www.copernic.com). Pros: Theses searches will give you a quick, overview of the many search sites, often times yielding organized material in a quick and easy manner. They are good for a fast look of what is available from many of the good search sites around. Cons: These sites do not have the extensive filtering and search options as the robotic search engines, so your searched cannot be narrowed to the same degree. How to use: These sites represent a compromise between directories and robotic search engines and are good for subject areas between the broad and the very narrow. If you were looking for information on "Seattle hotels" -- these sites would be a good start. These sites also give you a quick overview search of what is out there on the net. Gateway Sites: No search site can gather industry specific information in as organized of manner as an industry "gateway" site can. Normally, these sites will have substantial content, but what makes them a gateway is the multiple links to other related sites. There are many gateway sites for the meetings and hospitality industries including the Meeting Industry Mall (www.mim.com); MeetingsNet (http://www.aip.com); and industry association sites such as MPI’s www.mpiweb.org and PCMA’s www.pcma.org [include ASAE’s www.asaenet.org for Association Meetings] – all with numerous links to sites with meetings industry content. One of the exciting recent entrants in this field is Plansoft (www.plansoft.com) which contains the most comprehensive database of meeting hotels on the net. It also has excellent search and filtering capabilities to narrow your searches. Pros: These sites automatically focus your search to the industry you are interested in. They yield high quality, organized information, created by people that know the industry. Cons: None except for limitations in individual site design. How to use: Explore these sites, and check out their many links to other related sites. This is a good way to start your "bookmark" or "favorites" files and find out what is available for our industry. Learning the differences and how to use these four types of starting point sites will bring you a long way to increasing productivity by helping you find what you want quickly and efficiently.
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