The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 1

----------------------------------------------------
T H E  P A N D I A  P O S T
----------------------------------------------------

No. 1, January 2000

The Pandia Post is the newsletter of the Pandia Search Central, your online guide to Internet searching.

----------------------------------------------------

/////EDITORIAL

Dear fellow searcher, I would like to welcome you to the very fist issue of The Pandia Post, Pandia's newsletter on Internet searching. We have come a long way since the Pandia Search Central was launched in September last year. The Goalgetter search tutorial has become increasingly popular among teachers and librarians, and we have established a new Internet directory based on the Open Directory. Pandia News has now its own search engine for news searching. One should not forget, however, that it all started in January 1999 with the Pandia Powersearch gateway, an Internet search toolbox listing all the high quality search services we could think of: search engines, directories, news services, people finders, MP3 searh engines etc. etc. We are constantly updating it. If know about search services that should be included, please let us know! Our next project will be to enlarge the Search Resource section with reviews of the major search services.

The Editor

----------------------------------------------------

/////SEARCH TIPS

* MUST BE PRESENT:

Use the plus sign to force a word to be present in the results, like this:

+Apple

(Note: There should be no space between the + and the word.)

* MAY BE PRESENT:

Simply separate by spaces for optional inclusion:

+Apple Jobs

(The search engine will fetch pages that _will_ include the word Apple, and that _may_ include the word Jobs. Pages that include both words will normally be listed first).

* MUST NOT BE PRESENT:

Use the minus sign to expressly exclude a term from results:

+Apple Jobs -fruit

* PHRASES:

Wrap phrases in quotation marks:

"Pandia Search Central"

----------------------------------------------------

/////PANDIA SEARCH WORLD

APPLE WITH NEW WEB DIRECTORY

Apple.com has relaunched its main website, Apple.com, and included a new small Web directory called iReview (after the very popular iMac and iBook computers, we presume). What makes it stand out, is the fact that has long in-depth reviews of the few sites that are included. The sites are rated with one to five stars.

YAHOO MOST POPULAR

WebSideStory reports that Yahoo! is becomng increasingly more popular and now accounts for close to 56% of all search engine referrals. In comparison Excite fell from 26.51% in January 1999 to 9.66% on December 19.

----------------------------------------------------

/////SITESEEING

SEARCH ENGINE WATCH

TRAFFICK ON PORTALS

SEARCH ENGINE: ALTA VISTA

In case you did not know: A search engine is not a directory. A directory like Yahoo! or Pandia Plus is a collection of links to websites reviewed and edited by human beings like you and me. A search engine, on the other hand, uses a special programme (called a spider or a crawler) to surf the Web automatically, copying all the data into a huge database (an index or list of information). So when you are "searching" the Web using the Alta Vista search engine, you are not searching the Web at all, but the information Alta Vista has gathered on their computers. Not one of the various search engines has information that covers the entire Web. Nor are all the results up to date. That is why you should use more than one of the search engines.

Alta Vista was originally established as a showcase for the Digital Equipment Corporation. They wanted to demonstrate the quality and speed of their Alpha 8400 TurboLaser Computer by indexing every single word on the World Wide Web. They have not succeeded in this yet, but Alta Vista has nevertheless one of the best search tools available. Alta Vista uses a proprietary algorithm to sort the results of your search query, taking into account the number of keywords on a page, where the keywords appear, how close they stand and more.

There are three ways of entering a query. You may ask a question in plain English. If you do this Alta Vista will search the Ask Jeeves database to find a suitable answer. In addition it will feed you information from the Alta Vista database. If you just enter a couple of search words, you will get results from the Alta Vista database only. You may use "search engine maths" (+, - and "phrases"). If you want to use proper Boolean search terms like AND and OR, you must use the special search form for advanced searching.

Alta Vista will give you one and only one result from each website; you must click on "More pages from this site" to get more.

Alta Vista has a great feature that lets you translate a page from one language to another. Click on "Translate" in the result list. The translation is far from perfect, but it does give you a pretty good idea of what the page is about.

Sometimes you will see a small RN close to the first result or a text saying that you can click for Internet Keywords related to your search. These terms refer to hits for the RealNames database. Firms may pay RealNames to get a higher rating.

The front page of Alta Vista also gives you a hierarchical Web directory. This used to be based on the LookSmart Web directory, now you get listings from the Open Directory Project (which also feeds the Pandia Plus Directory). You will normally find links to Open Directory categories at the bottom of the result page.

You may also search for Usenet Newsgroup articles and photos. There is a Family filter that enables you to exclude offensive content.

----------------------------------------------------

/////BOOKS SEARCH ENGINES FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB.

One of our favourites at the moment is _Search Engines for the World Wide Web_ by Alfred and Emily Glossbrenner. The Glossbrenners have written books on the most diverse subjects, but that does not mean that they do not know what they are talking about. Their skills in popularising difficult topics makes this an excellent book for newcomers to Internet searching, but it also includes information that could be useful for more seasoned (re)searchers.

The authors give each of six major search engines--Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and HotBot--its own chapter, with charts for fast reference and complete descriptions of each engine's query terms for improved performance. An introductory chapter discusses the basics of searching--unique keywords, Boolean operators, and "the Seven Habits of Effective Web Searches". Other chapters cover hunting for Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, people, companies, and specific topics and subjects.

Go to

to buy this book from Amazon.com,

or to

to buy it from Amazon.co.uk in Europe.

----------------------------------------------------

/////AT LAST...

----------------------------------------------------

The Pandia Post is edited by Per and Susanne Koch

mailto:editor@aviana.com

The Pandia Post is copyright 2000 P&S Koch. All rights reserved. Feel free to forward this newsletter to others as long as as you forward it in its entirety and leave this notice.