Finding Your Way in Cyberspace

by James M. Ennes, Jr.

The Internet, according to popular wisdom, is a vast and impenetrable morass understood only by nerds, nuts, and precocious 14-year-olds.

While that may have been partly true years or even months ago, it is no longer the case. Technology, free enterprise and the profit motive have worked together to make easy what was once difficult. An electronic search for information that five years ago might have required expert help and many hours can be accomplished today in minutes by the average computer user. What once might have cost hundreds of dollars can now be done for pennies, usually for no charge beyond the basic Internet connection fee.

Making that possible have been a proliferation of new search programs, known as “search tools” or “search engines,” created by some of the world’s most innovative and ambitious companies, all scrambling to make a buck in this new thing called “the Internet.”

Indexing the Internet is a daunting task. The graphic portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (WWW) the portion that is the home of “web sites” or “home pages”is said to comprise more than 30 million individual Web sites containing more than 15 billion words.

To put that number in perspective, 15 billion words would probably fill about 200,000 books and consume more than two miles of uninterrupted shelf space. To find a single word in that jungle would be next to impossible without an index.

The folks who created Netscape, the leading Internet browser, tell us that a person visiting one Web page per minute for ten hours a day would need four years just to visit one million sites. In a lifetime no one could hope to visit all 30 million. Some say that number will at least double before the end of this year!

Yet it is now possible in just a few seconds to find almost any word or string of words almost anywhere in that huge galaxy. Once found, a single click of a computer mouse will usually put the information on your screen in a few seconds. From there it is a simple matter to read it, save it to a permanent file, or clip and send it as electronic mail.

In addition to the World Wide Web, the Internet offers more than 13,000 discussion groups, each with hundreds of public messages for anyone to read. Subjects range from bonsai and home schooling to Middle East politics and the Unabomber. Want to know what people are saying about Israeli land confiscations? No problem. Search for “Israel + confiscations” and you will find a dozen public discussions and thousands of other references to these subjects.

If you wish, you can post you own views in public mail for all to see, or reply privately to others who have posted public mail.

Until recently, these casual and sometimes-indiscreet messages faded from view after a few hours. No more. Modern search engines seek to record forever every word in every public message. Writers will be held to a level of accountability they never expected.

The Search Tools

The InfoSeek Guide at Internet address guide.infoseek.comis one of the oldest of the many search tools and is rated the best by both Internet World and PC Computing. This search tool can provide almost instantaneous and quite remarkable results.

For example, an InfoSeek search for “Deir Yassin” promptly returned the introduction to Uri Davis’s Israel: An Apartheid State with a detailed account of the massacre there. A search for “Sabra and Shatila” turned up a Jerusalem Post article in which the words “Sabra and Shatila” were buried deep in a story about bus bombings.

Some search engines index every word in every Web site or news group. Others index only titles or key words. Some understand Boolean operators such as and, or, not, if, while others do not. Some choke on word combinations, so that a search for “south Lebanon” might find every instance of south and also every instance of Lebanon. But even the “hits” are usually scored with those closest to your target at the top of the list. The bigger problem is not in finding what you want, but in being overwhelmed by more than you can handle.

My favorite search tool is Digital Equipment Corporation’s AltaVista searcher at www.altavista.digital.com. First introduced in December, AltaVista seeks to index every word in the Internet, and to update the index every 2.5 days. To accomplish that, AltaVista sends 1,000 small programs called “spiders” to roam the “Web” looking for changes or additions. That ambitious goal is yet to be fully achieved, but the combination of speed, a huge database, and the ability to search for such combinations as “Israel + Lebanon + Hezbollah + shelling” will neatly refine almost any search. That particular combination yielded 665 Hezbollah hits, and everything from newspaper articles to presidential speeches covering those points.

It is now possible to find almost any word or string of words.

For truly comprehensive searches, the C/NET search engine found at www.search.com/ provides direct links to 250 individual search tools offering specialized searches of everything from art and automobiles to medicine and space. C/NET also simplifies and speeds the task, allowing several searches at once from their site.

Directories

Navigation aids are not limited to search tools. The WWW also offers directories. These, too, seek to catalog everything in cyberspace.

The Yahoo directory at www.yahoo.com is the most popular. Yahoo organizes the WWW by categories, such as art, medicine or politics, then leads the cybernaut to subcategories. Many people routinely make Yahoo their starting point for all Web travel. Using Yahoo, a researcher can quickly find thousands of listings in any subject of interest, sorted by sub-topics and updated daily.

Point Communications at www.pointcom.com is one of several indexes that review Web sites for quality and content, awarding “top 5 percent” and “top 10 percent” ratings for excellence. McKinley’s Magellan directory at magellan.mckinley.com rates gives three- and four-star ratings to sites they consider the best. Both let a user choose among the top sites listed, or let searchers browse by name or category. Both, incidentally, give their highest ratings to the USS Liberty Web site at www.halcyon.com/jim/ussliberty/.

The WWW also offers a number of directories modeled after conventional yel-low page telephone directories. These include “The Yellow Pages” at theyellowpages.com; Nynex Interactive Yellow Pages at www.niyp.com; World Wide Yellow Pages at www.yellow.com; and others. Some, such as the Internet Yellow Pages by Osborne-McGraw Hill, are published in hard copy versions of more than 800 pages, complete with index, table of contents, and descriptions.

Looking for Someone?

Who Where by ParSec Communications at www.whowhere.com is the answer. Here you will find the e-mail address of nearly everyone who has one. You can even customize your own listing and add the address of your Web site, if you have one.

Still looking? Visit The Switchboard at www.switchboard.com. Switchboard lists the telephone number and street address of nearly every person and business in America with a listed telephone.

There are hundreds of ways to find what you want. These are but a very few of the many tools now available to make navigating the Internet a simple task. Most of these can be found easily, just be typing the address. Some browsers such as Netscape make it even easier; with Netscape you just click a “search” button to choose from a score of search tools.

Finding what you want on the Internet has become easier and quicker than using a public library. It is also more likely to produce whatever you are looking for. And it is getting easier almost daily as new software is developed.