A Guide to EXCITE

Excite is the newest addition to the Netscape search page. It differs slightly from some other search engines in that it will allow you to search either by keyword, or by concept (that is, it will find pages which have the same central ideas to what you are searching. Excite also allows you to choose where you search, which may vary from the WWW to Usenet Newsgroups.
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. Excite Syntax:

Listed below is a short summary of the most used and effective syntax rules in Excite. Using these will ensure you are able to fully harness the power of excite to give you the best results.

Phrases must be enclosed in quotation marks (eg: "......"). For example, if you are searching for information on the australia's first bank, you would enclose it like "australia's first bank", otherwise, Excite will return all sites with any of these words, and not necessary all of them.
By using the + and - signs you are able to specify which keywords/phrases to include, and which to leave out. (eg: "George Washington"+"America" will search for sites with both of these, while "Australian Movies"-"Strictly Ballroom" will look up all sites that include Australian movies but leave out Strictly Ballroom).
Boolean Operators turn off the concept based mechanism on Excite and only search for exact word/phrase matches (Boolean operators are better left for the experienced users). These operators include: AND, AND NOT, OR and parentheses. (eg: to search for sites including the words computer, magazine, but not australia, the search string would look like this: 'computer AND magazine AND NOT australia'.

3. Understanding Search Results:

Depending on what area of the Internet your are searching (WWW, Usenet Newsgroups etc.) Excite will display the results of a search differently. Excite gives each result a relevance rating. The closer it is too 100%, the more likely it is to be what you are looking for. The ratings are based on a comparison between the site and your search query. The display format for the different parts of the Internet are listed below:

WWW: Results are listed ten at a time, and for each result you'll see the title, URL, a brief summary, a clickable link and another link which gives you the option "More Like This".
Excite Web Guide: Results are listed ten at a time, and for each site you'll see the title, URL, the topics under which it is categorised in the Web Guide section, and the review.
Usenet Newsgroups: Results are listed upto 20 at a time in decreasing order of relevance. You'll see the subject of the message, the author, the Usenet group it came from, and the data. The subject of the message is a clickable link which will show you the entire message.

4. Other Features:

The other main feature of Excite is it proberly give us the widest choice of which part of the internet we want to search. These include:

World Wide Web.
Excite Web Guide.
Current News.
City.Net
Usenet Newsgroups.

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