Finding on the Internet. Ways to find information on the web

General information.

Currently, the Internet unites hundreds of millions of servers that host billions of different sites and individual files containing various kinds of information. It is a gigantic repository of information. There are various methods of searching for information on the Internet.

Search for a known address. The necessary addresses are taken from directories. Knowing the address, it is enough to enter it in address bar Browser.

www.gov.ru is a server of Russian state authorities.

Construction of the address by the user. Knowing the system of forming an address on the Internet, you can construct addresses when searching for Web sites.

A thematic or geographic domain must be added to the keyword (the name of a company, enterprise, organization, or a simple English noun), and intuition must be included.

Commercial Web site addresses:

www.cnn.com (CNN World News),

www.sony.com (SONY firm),

www.mtv.com (MTV Music News).

Addresses of educational institutions:

www.ntu.edu ( National University USA).

Regional server addresses:

www.poland.net (Poland),

www.israil.net (Israel).

Internet search engines

To search for information on the Internet, special information retrieval systems have been developed. Search engines have a regular address and are displayed as a Web page containing special tools for organizing a search (search string, subject directory, links). To call the search engine, just enter its address in the address bar of the Browser.

According to the method of organizing information, information retrieval systems are divided into two types: classification (rubricators) and dictionary.

Rubricators (classifiers) are search engines that use a hierarchical (tree-like) organization of information. When searching for information, the user looks through thematic headings, gradually narrowing the search field (for example, if you need to find the meaning of a word, then first you need to find a dictionary in the classifier, and then find the desired word in it).

Dictionary search engines are powerful automatic hardware and software systems. With their help, information on the Internet is viewed (scanned). Data on the location of this or that information are entered into special reference books-indexes. In response to a query, a search is performed according to the query string. As a result, the user is offered the addresses (URLs) at which the search word or group of words was found at the time of scanning. By choosing any of the suggested URL-links, you can go to the found document. Most of today's search engines are mixed.

The most famous and popular search engines:

www.aport.ru www.yahoo.com www.rambler.ru www.yandex.ru www.altavista.com www.google.com

There are systems specializing in the search for information resources in various areas.

Search for people on the Internet:

www.whowhere.ru ww. bigfoot.com

Newsgroup Search (Usenet):

www.dejanews.com

Subject search engines:

Search software:

Search in file archives:

http: // ftpseach. city.ru, http: // ftpsearch. licos.com

Directories (thematic collections of links with annotations):

http://www.atrus.ru

Often an effective search for information can be carried out using regional directories - specialized servers containing data on enterprises or Web resources of a city or region. For example, for St. Petersburg such a directory is located at http://www.spb.ru.

A list of the IPS can be found at www.monk. newmail.ru

A more detailed list of search engines and directories is presented in table. 3.2.

Request execution rules

In each search engine see the Help section for information on how to search, how to compose a query string. Below is information about a typical, "average" query language.

Simple request.

Enter one word defining the topic of your search. For example, in the Rambler.ru search engine it is enough to enter: automatic.

There are documents that contain the words specified in the request. All forms of words of the Russian language are recognized, as a rule, the case of letters is ignored.

You can use the "*" or "?" Character in the query. Sign "?" a single character is replaced in the keyword, which can be replaced by any letter, and the "*" sign is a sequence of characters.

For example, the query automatic * will allow you to find documents that include the words automatic, automatic, etc.

Complex query.

It is often necessary to combine keywords to obtain more specific information. In this case, additional linking words, functions, operators, symbols, combinations of operators, separated by brackets are used.

For example, the query music & (beatles | beatles) means that the user is looking for documents containing the words music and beatles or music and the beatles.

Table 3.1 shows the rules for generating queries adopted in the Aport system (http://www.aport.ru).

Table 3.1

Operators for generating queries

Operator	Synonyms	A comment
AND	AND &	Documents containing both keywords... You don't have to write it. For example, query: computer science and textbook is equivalent to computer science textbook
OR	OR \|	A search is performed for those documents in which any of the specified words or both words are used at the same time
NOT	NOT - ~	The search is limited to documents that do not contain the word specified after the operator
" "	" "	Double or single quotes allow you to find a phrase
Date =	date: date =	The search is limited to documents found in set interval date Example 1 currency date = 01/02/2002-01/03/2002. Upon this request, documents will be issued containing the word "currency" and having a date from February 1, 2002 to March 1, 2002 Example 2. date = 01/03/2002 currency Example 3. Date:<02/03/2002 валюта

Table 3.2

List of search engines and directories

Address	Description
www.excite.com	Search engine with site reviews and guides
www.alta-vista.com	Search server, advanced search capabilities available
www.hotbot.com	Search Server
www.poland.net www.israil.net	Regional search servers of Poland, Israel
www.ifoseek.com	Search server (easy to use)
www.ipl.org	Internet Publik library, a public library operated by the World Village project
www.wisewire.com	WiseWire - Artificial Intelligence Search
www.webcrawler.com	WebCrawler - search engine, easy to use
www.yahoo.com	Web directory and interface for accessing full-text search on the AltaVista server
www.aport.ru	Aport - Russian-language search server
www.yandex.ru	Yandex - Russian-language search server
www.rambler.ru	Rambler - Russian-language search server
Online Help Resources
www.yellow.com	Internet Yellow Pages
monk. newmail.ru	Search engines of various profiles
www.top200.ru	Top 200 Web Sites
www.allru.net
www.ru	Catalog of Russian Internet resources
www.allru.net/z09. htm	Educational resources
www.students.ru	Server of Russian students
www.cdo.ru/index_new. asp	Distance Learning Center
www.open. ac. uk	Open University of Great Britain
www.ntu.edu	US National University
www.translate.ru	Electronic text translator
www.pomorsu.ru/guide. library.html	List of links to network libraries
www.elibrary.ru	Scientific electronic library
www.citforum.ru	Digital library
www.infamed.com/psy	Psychological tests
www.pokoleniye.ru	Internet Education Federation website
www.metod. narod.ru	Educational resources
www.spb. osi.ru/ic/distant	Distance learning on the Internet
www.examen.ru	Exams and tests
www.kbsu.ru/~book/	Computer science textbook
Mega. km.ru	Encyclopedias and dictionaries

Searching for information on the Internet: pitfalls

Problems that do not lie on the surface often make themselves felt only "in hindsight", after a certain stage of prospecting work has been completed and, possibly, based on its results, a decision has already been made. What prevents to make the situation transparent from the very beginning of the operation of a particular information retrieval system (ISS)? The answer is quite simple: the lack of comprehensive information of this kind on the part of the developer. The direct consequence of this is the inaccuracy of the received data and their uncontrolled loss. It is rare to find a search engine on the Web that does not have some "undocumented" features. It would seem that the user needs not so much information, namely:

how is the filling of the ISS database and what is its volume;

a full range of capabilities of the search language of the system;

the main features of the presentation of search results, first of all, the algorithm for ranking records from the list of responses to a search query.

Alas, the source of such information is usually not a document available from the home page of a search engine, but publications of individual authors scattered across the Web, books and computer magazines. The reasons for this state of affairs, apparently, can be attributed not only to the developer's negligence, but also a factor called marketing policy. Simply put, providing a search engine with the most complete information about itself does not always have a positive effect on its ranking. Nevertheless, in some cases, the user is quite capable of taking control of the situation. It is often possible to find out the peculiarities of the work of a selected search service through testing. The construction of special test queries that quickly clarify exactly that aspect of the system operation that is most important for the current task, in many cases turns out to be nontrivial. We will devote our discussion to how to avoid some troubles when working with IPS. The well-known Internet search engines will be considered as examples to illustrate the presentation.

More and more people are looking for the information they need on the World Wide Web. will be more effective if you follow some simple rules. All search engines have a specific one. A successful Internet search is impossible without at least a superficial knowledge of these principles. There is such a huge amount of different information on the Internet that chaotic and disorganized Internet searches will lead nowhere... You will spend a lot of time and nerves, and you will find only crumbs of what you needed.

Searching the Internet requires knowledge of certain principles and tricks. How can you find the information you need as quickly as possible? You just need to comply with certain regulations.

Correctly formulate your search query. It should not be too short or too long. The optimal search query length is 2-3 words.
If you are not satisfied with the result, try changing the query by swapping the words in the query or using synonyms.
To find the exact phrase or quote, enclose the search term in quotation marks.
Typically, entering a refined query is more efficient than searching the results.
Try not to formulate your search query as a question to the search engine.
Pay attention to the domains of sites from the search results, so as not to accidentally click on a suspicious link.
Usually, the most successful links and information in demand are on the first two or three pages of search results. By the way, it's not a fact that the best information will be exclusively on the first page.
Use more than one search engine, but several. Different search engines have different ranking principles, so what was not found in one may be found in another.
Use additional search technologies of search engines (image search, region search, blog search, advanced search, etc.).
Use the search capabilities of browsers. For example, the key combination Ctrl + F enables page search.

Please note that search results are dynamic and after a few days or even hours may change. Therefore, you should immediately add the found useful link to your bookmarks: next time the search result on the Internet may turn out to be different, and you will simply lose the site you once found.

In order to facilitate searching on the Internet, the Google search engine offers a number of additional operators and functions, which allow you to more accurately formulate a search query and make Internet searches more efficient.

Sign + allows you to forcibly include a word in the request: + how to search the internet... If it is in the middle of a phrase, it must be preceded by a space.
Sign — excludes a word from the list of search results: domestic cars.
Word OR or sign | are used to find one of two words: CD OR MP3 player (CD | MP3 player).
Sign ~ (tilde) allows you to find synonyms for words from a query: buy ~ motorcycle.
Sign * means any word: abstract on *.
Two points ( .. ) are used to search within a specific range of values: player for 150-200 dollars.

These operators have influence to the search query itself... The next group of operators simplifies Internet searches by narrowing the range of searches: pages in SERP are selected according to a specific criterion.

Operator Site needed to search the indexed pages of a particular site. It can be used both to find all indexed pages ( site: site), and for keyword searches on these pages ( site: hobby site).
Operator Filetype allows you to find files of a specific, for example: abstract on biology filetype: rtf.
Operator Cache displays pages saved in the search engine cache: cache: site... Why is this needed? It so happens that the necessary material has been removed from the site, but it remains in the cache for some time.
Operator Define allows you to find the definition of words and phrases: define search engine.
To search for sites similar in topic to a specific site, use the operator Related: related: site.

Some of Google's search functions can make your day-to-day life much easier, including the weather forecast, currency converter, and more.

To find out weather forecast, just enter the word "weather" and the name of your country and town: weather in Moscow... For the USA, in addition to the city, the state and zip code are indicated.
If you need to know Timezone, in which this or that city is located, enter the phrase "time zone" and the name of the city in the search bar: time zone Kaliningrad.
You can restrict the search for various organizations (restaurants, shops, etc.) a certain city: pizza in Kazan.
If you want to know movie schedule in a certain locality, add the name of your city to the query "cinema": cinema in Sochi.
For searching city maps a search query like this is used: St. Petersburg map(substitute the city you want), from the search results page you can go to the Google Maps service.
Google search bar can be used as calculator by introducing an example to be calculated: (7+3*5)/11=
Also this search engine allows convert units of measurement from English to metric and vice versa: 9.5 yards to centimeters.
In addition to converting units of measurement, you can also convert currency different countries, for example: 200 USD to RUB.

Of course, this is not a complete list of functions and operators, but for a start, you should have enough of them. Searching the Internet can be complicated by the fact that not all operators and functions always work correctly... Often, for example, the Related operator "suffers" from incorrect search results.

Searching the Internet is very simple at first glance. But then, faced with a huge amount of information that is difficult to filter out, many users become frustrated with search engines. But in vain! Ability to correctly formulate a request and knowledge of some subtleties and tricks will save you from the tedious walking on unnecessary and uninformative sites.

Searching the Internet can be fast and efficient - if you know how to search correctly!

Finding information on the Internet

Finding information on the Internet

To find information in commonly used three ways(See Figure 1). First of them - search by address. It is used when the user knows the address of the information resource containing the information he needs. When organizing a search for information by address (the form of the address - IP, domain or URL - in this case it does not matter), the user just needs to enter the resource address in the appropriate field of the browser - a program designed to provide access to network resources.

Rice. 1. Methods of information search in hypertext databases

Second- search using hyperlink navigation. When using this type of search, the user must first access the server associated with the corresponding database. You can then find the document using hyperlinks. Obviously, this method is convenient when the resource address is unknown to the user. For use as a starting point for searching when implementing this method, Web portals are intended - servers that provide direct access to a number of servers, including information resources installed on them, as well as Web applications that implement Web services corresponding to the purpose of the portal. Servers accessible through the portal can refer to a specific system (for example, a corporate one) or various systems and be specially selected according to the specific, thematic or other characteristics of documents and data contained on their sites. Typically, portals combine a variety of functions in order to keep the client as long as possible. The dominant service of the portal is the help desk service: search, rubrics, financial indices, weather information, etc. While Web sites are mostly collections of static Web pages, portals are collections of software and pre-structured information that these tools turn into structured data when requested by specific users.

Third the search method involves the use of Internet search engines. Search engines are dedicated host computers that host databases of Internet resources. The user interface of such a server has a field for entering keywords describing the topic of interest to the user (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Yandex search server window view

The server perceives these words as an information request, in accordance with which it searches for resources and presents a list of found documents to the user. Obviously, when implementing this method, errors of both the 1st (target skipping) and the 2nd kind (information noise) are possible. It should be mentioned that two groups of search engines are distinguished: search engines and subject directories. Their difference is due to the method of creation and subsequent replenishment of the Internet resource database, which this server carries out information retrieval. So, search engines include a special program - a search robot. It constantly monitors the network, collects information from Web pages, indexes them and records their search image in its database. In subject catalogs, a database of Internet documents is formed "manually" by specialist editors. Since there is no single administration on the Internet, its information resources are constantly changing. New documents can appear in it and existing documents can disappear. The frequency of updating information in documents for different sites is different: for some it is several times an hour, for some - once a day, day, month, etc. Therefore, it is very important to understand that when using information retrieval systems to find information on the Internet, the search is carried out not in the real space of the Web documents, but in a certain model, the content of which may differ significantly from the actual content of the Internet at the time of the search. According to the degree of coverage of indexed resources, search engines can be divided into two groups: international and Russian-speaking. The first indexes all documents published on the Internet in a row. The latter index resources located in domain zones with a predominance of the Russian language. The list of the most popular systems is given in Table. 1.

Tab. 1. Most popular search engines

International	Russian speaking
Google	Yandex (44.4% of Runet)
Yahoo!	Rambler (10.6% of Runet)
Bing	Mail.ru (7.3% Runet)
MSN	Nigma (0.5% Runet)
AltaVista	Gogo.ru (0.3% Runet)
Ask	Aport (0.2% Runet)

Note: Runet is the Russian-speaking part of the Internet, constituting domains with names ru and rf.

It should be mentioned that there is a special category of search engines - metasearch engines. Their fundamental difference from search engines and subject catalogs is that they do not have their own index database, and therefore, having received a user's request, they redirect it to several search engines at once (see Fig. 3).

Rice. 3. The scheme of the metasearch system

The ability to use multiple search engines at the same time for one query is an obvious advantage of metasearch engines. At present, the Metabot.ru system has found wide application, the interface of which is shown in Fig. 4. This system allows you to use both international and Russian-language search engines to search for resources.

Finding information on the Internet

The Internet is growing at a very fast pace, making it increasingly difficult to find the information you need among hundreds of billions of Web pages and hundreds of millions of files. To find information, special search engines are used, which contain constantly updated information about the location of Web pages and files on hundreds of millions of Internet servers.

Search engines contain thematically grouped information about the information resources of the World Wide Web in databases. Special robotic programs periodically "crawl" the Internet Web servers, read all the documents they encounter, select keywords in them, and enter the Internet addresses of the documents into the database.

Most search engines allow the Web site author to enter information into the database himself by completing a registration form. In the process of filling out the questionnaire, the site developer enters the site address, its name, a brief description of the site's content, as well as keywords by which it will be easiest to find the site.

Search by keywords. The search for a document in the database of the search engine is carried out by entering queries into search field.

The request must contain one or more keywords, which are the main ones for this document. For example, to search for the Internet search engines themselves, you can enter the keywords "Russian Internet information search system" in the search field (Fig. 6.21).

Some time after sending a request, the search engine will return a list of Internet addresses of documents in which the specified keywords were found. To view this document in a browser, it is enough to activate the link pointing to it (Fig. 6.22).

If the keywords were chosen unsuccessfully, then the list of document addresses may be too large (it may contain tens or even hundreds of thousands of links). In order to narrow down the list, you can enter additional keywords in the search field or use the catalog of the search engine.

One of the most complete and powerful search engines is Google (www.google.com), which has 8 billion Web pages in its database and 5 million new pages by bots every month. In Runet (the Russian part of the Internet), search engines Yandex (www.yandex.ru) and Rambler (www.rambler.ru) have extensive databases containing 200 million documents each.

Search in a hierarchical directory system. In the search engine database, websites are grouped into hierarchical subject catalogs, which are analogous to the thematic catalog in the library.

Top-level thematic sections, for example: Internet, Computers, Science and Education etc., contain subdirectories. For example, the Internet directory may contain subdirectories Search, Mail and others (Fig. 6.23).

Searching for information in a directory is reduced to choosing a specific directory, after which the user will be presented with a list of links to the Internet addresses of the most visited and meaningful Web sites. Each link is usually annotated, that is, it contains a short commentary on the content of the document.

The most complete multilevel hierarchical thematic catalog of Russian-language Internet resources has the Aport search system (www.aport.ru). The directory contains detailed annotations of the content of the websites and an indication of their geographic location.

Search for files. To search for files on file archive servers, there are specialized search engines, including the FileSearch search engine (www.filesearch.ru). To search for a file, you must enter the file name in the search field, and the search engine will display the Internet addresses of the file archive servers that store the file with the specified name.

Searching for information in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet using the most search engines: Google, Rambler, Aport, Yaps1ex and the Research file search engine can be done using the integrated search engine Gogle.ru (Fig. 6.24). To do this, just enter keywords in the search bar, use the switches to set the type of required information and click on the button with the name of the search engine Gogle.ru (Fig. 6.24). To do this, it is enough to enter keywords in the search bar, use the switches to set the type of required information and click on the button with the name of the search engine.

Rice. 6.24. Integrated search engine Gogle.ru

Internet search methods

Three ways to search the Internet

The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide the subscriber with access to thousands of servers and millions of Web pages that store an unimaginable amount of information. How not to get lost in this "information ocean"? To do this, you need to learn how to search and find the information you need on the web.

As already mentioned, there are three main ways to find information on the Internet.

1. Specifying the page address. This is the fastest way to search, but can only be used if the address of the document is known exactly.

2. Navigation by hyperlinks. This is the least convenient way, since it can be used to search for documents that are only close in meaning to the current document. If the current document is about, for example, music, then using the hyperlinks of this document, it is unlikely that it will be possible to get to a site dedicated to sports.

3. Referring to a search engine (search engine)... Using search engines is the most convenient way to find information. Currently, the following search engines are popular in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet:

There are other search engines as well. For example, an efficient search system is implemented on the mail.ru server.

Search servers

The most accessible and convenient way to find information on the World Wide Web is to use search engines. In this case, the search for information can be carried out by catalogs, as well as by a set of keywords that characterize the searched text document.

Let's take a closer look at the use of search engines. Search Server contains a large number of links to a variety of documents, and all these links are systematized in subject catalogs. For example: sports, movies, cars, games, science, etc. Moreover, these links are installed by the server independently, automatically by regularly viewing all the Web pages that appear on the World Wide Web. In addition, search engines provide the user with the ability to search for information by keywords. After entering the keywords, the search engine starts scanning documents on other Web servers and displays links to those documents in which the specified words are found. Typically, search results are sorted in descending order of a special document rating, which shows how well a given document matches the search terms or how often it is requested on the web.

Search engine query language

A group of keywords, formed according to certain rules - using a query language, is called a query to a search server. The languages used for queries to different search engines are very similar. You can learn more about this by visiting the "Help" section of the desired search server. Let's consider the rules for forming queries using the Yandex search engine as an example.

Operator syntax	What does operator mean	Request example
space or &	Logical AND (within a sentence)	physiotherapy
&&	Logical AND (within a document)	recipes && (processed cheese)
\|	Logical OR	photo \| photography \| snapshot \| photographic image
+	Mandatory presence of a word in the found document	+ to be or + not to be
()	Grouping words	(technology \| production) (cheese \| cottage cheese)
~	Binary operator AND NOT (within a sentence)	banks ~ law
~~ or _	Binary operator AND NOT (within the document)	Paris travel guide ~~ (agency \| tour)
/ (n m)	Distance in words (minus (-) - back, plus (+) - forward)	suppliers / 2 coffee music / (- 2 4) education vacancies ~ / + 1 students
" "	Phrase search	red riding hood Equivalent to red / + 1 hat
&& / (n m)	Distance in sentences (minus (-) - backward, plus (+) - forward)	bank && / 1 taxes

To get the best search results, there are a few simple rules to remember:

1. Do not search for information by only one keyword.

2. It is better not to enter keywords with an uppercase letter, as this may lead to the fact that the same words written with a lowercase letter will not be found.

3. If you don't get any results in your search, check your keywords for spelling errors.

Modern search engines provide the ability to connect a semantic analyzer to the generated query. With it, you can, by entering a word, select documents in which derivatives of this word are found in various cases, tenses, etc.

Control questions

1. How is the search for documents by keywords? In the directory system?

Self-study assignments

6.8 Practical task. Compare search results for documents by keyword using different search engines (use the integrated search engine Gogle).

6.9 Practical task. Find the WinAmp media player file on file archive servers.

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Finding on the Internet. Ways to find information on the web

Internet search engines

Request execution rules

Searching for information on the Internet: pitfalls

Finding information on the Internet

Internet search methods

Three ways to search the Internet

Search servers

Search engine query language

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

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