The Computer Club Newsletter

May 2004

By Ron Uncapher

The Computer Club: Seek and Ye Shall Find

The Computer Club is moving on. The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, June 1, 2004. The "Beginner’s Basics" session will begin at 6:30 P.M. It will be followed, after a short break, by the business meeting at 7:30 P.M. The annual elections for the 2004/2005 club year will be followed by an informative presentation.

Many club members (and non-members) perhaps acquired their computers in order to more easily communicate with children and/or grandchildren. There must be more to computers than email! Well, there is, and most computer owners have found the Internet. The Internet can connect users to practically every conceivable piece of information that exists. Somewhere, someone has compiled the information you need into a website. All one has to do, is find it.

Denizens of the World Wide Web have been working on better ways to find information on the Internet since the Internet was invented. There are many sites devoted to searching the Internet for virtually any subject. They use software programs called Search Engines. Search engines have been refined over the years until today they are very powerful and very easy to use. There are search engines that search for anything in general or for a narrower, more specific range of subjects.

We will name some of the more popular and well known search engines, but there are many more. You may have a particular interest that leads you to the more specialized sites such as genealogy. Most of the popular Internet service providers have a search engine on their home pages, for instance Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are the most often seen. Some ISPs use their own search engine; some use another’s or a combination of others. The same can be said for some of the independent search sites, such as DogPile and Hotbot. These purport to combine some of the best features of a number of sites to serve the needs of their users. This technique is known as metasearch.

You may investigate the claims of these varying search engines for yourself and choose the one that best suits your needs. Go to any search engine and type search engines. The results page will come up with most all of them. You can also go directly to the site by typing www.xxxxxx.com in the URL address box of your browser: Some of the xxxxx’s are Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Lycos, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, ixquick, and Ask Jeeves. The search results for search engines will also find sites that can tell you more about search engines than I ever could. My favorite search engine happens to be Google. It is the state of art in search engines at the moment. Google’s popularity has prompted others to improve and add features. Google will even search for pictures or images, it will search catalogues and it has a "pop up blocker". You may have heard that Google is going public soon. Google has many services, more than most others, and after the IPO, they will develop even more. To make searchers easier to use, some, including Google have developed a toolbar that integrates into your browser. These are downloadable from the search engine’s website; just look for toolbar.

The simplest way to use a search engine is to type your subject word into the search window. You will quickly get more hits on articles and web pages that you will ever be able to use. If you type more than one word, such as football teams, you will get every article on football, football teams and teams. You can assure a specific result by putting the phrase in quotation marks: "Nashville Titans". Most search engines use "Boolean" or logical operators to allow a further refinement. OR and NOT used between words can allow you to narrow your search closer to exactly what you are looking for. The AND operator is usually implied. However, it is much easier and more dependable to use the "advanced search" facility that is included on most search engines (usually to the right of the search window). This gives you the opportunity to specify words you want as well as words you don’t want. You can also customize your search further by setting preferences. Clicking on these buttons will usually give you easy to follow instructions on their use.

More specifics on search targets and how to find them will be covered in the business meeting portion of the June TVCUC meeting. Be there!

I don’t mean to harp, but HAVE YOU UPDATED YOUR ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE THIS WEEK? And while you are at it, update Windows, as well; especially if you have Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP. These two have another vulnerability to close.