Lycos is a search engine that searches the Internet daily, building an index of what is available, and making this index available to be searched. The index contains every word on every page, so it will find every reference to the search words you have chosen.

1. Information Management:

The first step is to know what information you want to find, and sticking to it. This step is primary to all search engines. Otherwise, you can find yourself looking at something totally irrelevant, after hours have past and you still haven't found what you are looking for.

The second step is to best word the information so as to come up with the best possible results. A search engine can only work with what you give it. The key here is to be as specific as possible. If you want to find out information on black and white photography development, don't just write "photography", you want to write the whole lot, that way, your results will be more accurate and less plentiful.

The third step is writing the keyword(s) in a manner that the search engine will recognise. This is known as the sytnax, and will vary from engine to engine, but these first three steps are central to any search engine.

All this information so far speaks generally about any search engine, they are the steps you should take before you even touch the computer. The information below is specific to Infoseek.

2. Lycos Syntax:

Lycos does have a rather in-depth syntax, I will concentrate only on those which will I believe are central to you finding exactly what you want on the WWW. Here are what I believe fall into that category:

• By placing a period at the end of the search word(s) it will force Lycos to find an exact match of that word, to the letter including case.
  
• Lycos can also help you to exclude a certain word when you are searching. Say for example you want to look up all types of printers, except for Bubble jet, you simply type "printers" -"bubble jet". The minus sign "-" means exclude.
  
• When looking up something, we may not be confident that our spelling is correct. We can use wildcards to get over this. Say for example we are looking up "William Shakespeare" but we are unsure on how to spell his last name, we spell the as much as we can, then subsititute a $ for the rest of the name (eg: "William Shakesp$").
  
• When searching for a phrase, it should be contained within quotation marks (eg: "...."). This will ensure that lycos will only look for instances where these words occur together.
  
• When searching for names of people and places, use Capitalisation for the first letter.

3. Understanding Search Results:

Once again, reading your results using the Lycos search engine is very much the same as with any other search engine. When the results come back, they are put in order from what Lycos considers to be the closest match to what you are looking for first, the next closest match next, and so on.

Each match has a short description of what you will find at the site (sometimes this description doesn't sound like anything that would help you, but remember that Lycos doesn't only search the summary, it searches the site, so it might be a good idea to check it out still, especially if it is near the top of your search results), a percentage ranking of how closely Lycos thinks it matches your initial search words, a clickable link to the site, and usually an address so you know where you are heading.

4. Other Features:

Along with what is standard for a search engine, Lycos also offers some things that normal search tools do not. On the Lycos search homepage, there are links which enable you to:

• Browse the top 5% of the WWW.
  
• Perform a "people find"
  
• Add your site to Lycos.
  
• Advertise with Lycos.
  
• An indepth help page.
  
• Chat.
  
• Visit Newsgroups.
  
• Customise your search.

Now you should have a pretty good understanding of how Lycos works. Why not give it a try. Click here to take you to the Lycos search page. If you still have problems, try the Lycos Help Page, or look at some of my examples.