tune up your searches!

 

Want to find somone or something on the internet?

 

FIND A PERSON:

Anyone, even a government bureaucrat, can find

me and many other people simply by entering the name in the search field of a major search engine.

They can go to one of the big "name and contact" databases on the Web, such as Bigfoot or Switchboard. Just going to a portal is often enough.

A "portal" is simply the opening screen for many people going on the Web, such as AOL or Yahoo.

If you go to Yahoo, click on "People Search."

FIND A SITE:

Sometimes you can't seem to find what you're looking for, even though it's really there.

www.alltheweb.com is a unique search engine. It is brand-new (Oct. '99), still under formation and has the modest goal of listing every Web page in the world!! The good news is that it can find what your looking for, no matter what; the bad news is that it will find too many references to look at. Narrow your search terms.

 

Find it here:

Try these places to find just about anything:

Go2Net, Profusion, and Beaurcoup are "metasearch" engines, meaning they search other search engines to find an answer to your query. Beaucoup has a directory of search engines by subject matter. Profusion has good descriptions. Go2Net has a good tool called "metacrawler".

 

People Searchers:

Here are some specialized people searchers:

www.worldemail.com (18 million e-mail addresses and links to other global search enginges)

Tools:

A lot of time and effort can be saved by using search utilities. These programs search the search engines to locate your quarry and answer your query. There are about 2,000 search engines; these utilities can search a hundred at a time. Can you handle that much information?

 

The two best-known search utilities are WebFerret and Copernic. Both are available free from shareware sites such as www.zdnet.com and from their own sites: www.copernic.com and www.ferretsoft.com If you want lots of bells and whistles for highly defined searches, you can buy the big version of their software, but most people will find the smaller free versions more than adequate.

 

In closing:

Major search engines have freeware and shareware sections. Also:

  • www.hotfiles.com has the straight shot to ZDNet's shareware files. The mother lode.

  • www.asp-shareware.com is the official site of the Association of Shareware Proffesionals.

  • www.microsoft.com lists the top 10 sites for downloading shareware. Just enter "shareware" in the search field.

  • www.tucows.com Tons of Windows and Macintosh shareware, plus Linux, Palm Pilots and BeOS.

  • www.pslweb.com offers 20,000 shareware and freeware titles! Enough said.

 

 

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