Chapter 3 - Searching the Web

Since my job sort of forces me to stay more on the hardware side of computers, I often don’t get to read or use much on the software side.  Chapter 3 was another eye-opener for me as far as learning some new things.  For example, using the web directory DMOZ instead of a search engine was very helpful, because web directories don’t rank the hits you get like Google does (sometimes unfairly).  Also, using a search engine like Google or Yahoo to find something, getting tons of different hits, and not being sure how to sort them was always difficult for me.  However, utilizing the web directory DMOZ seemed like a good alternative to refine the hits you get when searching for specific topics, or to do a more advanced search altogether.

Although I knew about other search engines like Bing, Altavista, and Yahoo, I had not heard of Gigablast.  Like DMOZ, it is an open source product.  Since I had never heard of Gigablast, I decided to do more research on it and found the following site, called searchenginejournal.com. It went a little bit more in-depth about Gigablast than what was in our book. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/gigablast-better-than-google-or-askcom-according-to-study/655.  What I found even more helpful on this site was this article titled Top 10 Tools For Managing Your Social Media Accounts.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-10-tools-managing-social-media-accounts/87843/

Child-friendly search engines are a great idea.  It’s too late for me to suggest them to my kids, but I will certainly make friends and relatives with young children aware of the types of sites mentioned in Chapter 3. I had also not dealt much with Metasearch engines, which compile search results from different search engines into single search results.  Again, here is another extremely useful tool which I plan to use more often in the future.

Over the past few years, I’ve heard many people talk about LexisNexis, but never knew what it was used for.  This seems like it would be a great help to people employed in the legal, medical, and government sectors. I wanted to know more about how to go about using this site, and that led me to the link I found below.  It walks you through step by step on how to sign in to LexisNexis, retrieve the documents you need, and obtain the best search results. http://www.lexisnexis.com/lexisenhancements/literature/lp20827-0-quick-ref.pdf