The problem of search and means of its organization

The gigantic and ever-increasing amount of information available on the Internet, incl. operational, makes the problem of finding the necessary information very relevant and complex. The speed of searching for the necessary information determines to a large extent the professionalism of the Internet user. It is worth saying that to automate the ϶ᴛᴏth task, various, both foreign and domestic search systems have been developed, which are Web pages of a special type. At the same time, despite the availability of numerous search automation tools, this task remains quite laborious, requiring the user to have certain experience, intuition, and knowledge of the terminology used in his subject area.

An estimate published in the journal Nature on July 8, 1999 estimated that the number of publicly indexed Web pages was 800 million. A year later, the author of the study (Steve Lawrence of the NEC Research Institute) believed that their number had almost doubled to 1.5 billion. Even the best search engines index no more than one page in six. It is worth saying that in order to extract useful information from the Internet, you need to know where and how to search.

Internet Explorer's Search tool simplifies access to search tools, eliminating the need to know the addresses of search engines. In this case, it is better to directly contact search engines by loading the ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙ page.

According to the method of organizing the search and the capabilities provided, all search tools can be conditionally divided into the following groups:

catalogs and specialized databases;

search engines;

metasearch systems.

Catalogs and databases

Catalogs on the WWW are similar to systematic library catalogs. Directory search consists of moving sequentially through a hierarchical list of links called headings or categories. The first page of the directory contains links to major topics such as Culture and Art; Medicine and health; Society and politics; Business and Economics; Entertainment, etc. Clicking on a ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙ link (category) opens a page containing links detailing the selected topic (rubric). Moving down the detail categories, you can find a page with the desired information. On each page opened when moving through the catalog in one way or another, the sequence of viewed nested headings is indicated, for example, Business World: Finance: Analytics, etc.

All catalogs are created and maintained up to date manually by specialists, in the same way that bibliographers compile and maintain library catalogs. It is appropriate to note that the description of the document is done either by the compilers of the catalogue, or by the author. Thanks to ϶ᴛᴏmu, the content of the pages included in the catalog is most adequate to the heading to which they are assigned. But, given the speed of replenishment and changes in information on the Internet, the "manual" method of maintaining catalogs does not allow to equally reflect the real state of Internet resources on this topic.

Search engines

(search engines, search engines, search robots)

There are dozens of large and thousands of small and specialized Web sites dedicated to Internet search. Search tools of the ϶ᴛᴏth group will allow the user, according to certain rules, to formulate requirements for the information he needs (create a query using the query language). » search engine, ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙ follow user-defined requirements (relevant to the query) Search nodes can use their own Internet indexes, constantly updated by special programs called spiders (spiders) The spider program examines the Web, checking each link on a given page, then on pages addressed links, etc., and informs its owner about all pages for subsequent indexing.

As a result of the search, one or more pages are created containing links to documents (Web pages) relevant to the query. It is worth saying that for each link, the date of creation of the document, its volume, the degree of relevance to the query, text fragments that characterize the content of the document are usually also indicated. Clicking on such a link allows you to download the page of interest. In the case of a very large number of documents found, you can refine the query and in ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙ and repeat the search with it, but only among the selected pages (such a search is called differently in different machines, but usually ϶ᴛᴏ - search in the found one) In a number of search engines, you can use a certain method change the link to the page whose content best suits your needs, and repeat the search, requiring you to search for similar ones.

The advantage of automated search is, in fact, that it provides a view of very large amounts of information available on the Internet at a given moment. At the same time, the complexity of an accurate description of the request that adequately reflects your information needs, as well as the even greater complexity of the task of automatically determining the degree of ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙ your request of pages viewed, leads to the fact that the number of pages selected “on the first run” is traditionally either very small or excessively large . In general, search using a search engine is an iterative (multi-pass) process, as a result of which the query form is gradually refined.

Metasearch engines

As noted above, any search engine looks through a certain set of servers and selects documents in ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙii with its own criteria. As a result, the search by different systems for the same keywords gives different results. This led to the idea of ​​creating the so-called metasearch (or multisearch) systems, which do not search for anything themselves, but turn to several search engines for help at once. Note that each of the metasearch engines has a ϲʙᴏth query language. The system translates the query formulated in its language into the query languages ​​used by each search engine. Further, the search results by all systems are combined and presented in a ϲᴏᴏᴛʙᴇᴛϲᴛʙ form. Naturally, searches using metasearch engines take longer than conventional search engines.

Overview of the most popular search engines

There are a large number of search engines on the Internet, and each user is guided by the one to which he is accustomed or to which his colleagues advised him. We will use a brief description of the most popular search engines, which is given on one of the sites.

1. Google (www.google.com) The fastest and largest search engine. More than 1.3 billion pages have been indexed (of which a little over 700 million are completely, about the rest only the address and link text are known). You can include/exclude results from specific sites and/or domains. Unlike most search engines, Google evaluates the popularity of a resource by the number of links leading to it from other pages. There is a topic-oriented search - Apple Macintosh, BSD UNIX, Linux, US government and University searches - searches in the resources of leading scientific and educational institutions.

2. Yandex (www.yandex.ru) The best domestically produced search engine. It indexes mainly Russian-language resources, while ϶ᴛᴏm is not inferior to foreign systems in terms of capabilities. The search can be performed exactly or in any word forms, limited by date, indicating the site or its subdirectory. You can search based on the so-called citation index, search for images, scripts, applets; set the language of the document. The necessary links are traditionally found in the first ten results. It has a "lite" version (with a minimum of design elements) at http://www.ya.ru.

3. AltaVista (www.altavista.com) Provides a large expansion of search criteria: in Advanced search there is a choice of time interval, which includes the date of creation or modification of the resource, support for 25 languages; there is the possibility of issuing one result per site (϶ᴛᴏ narrows the search circle without sacrificing quality) Power search has a standard set of features. Until recently, AV was a large portal, but due to financial (and not only) reasons, it has significantly reduced the number of services.

4 Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) It is important to note that one of the first search engines on the Internet. In addition to the standard set of functions, it allows you to select resources by date (4 years, 1, 3, 6 months, a week, 1, 3 days) Supports the ability to specify the "*" sign instead of any sequence of characters in keywords. On Yahoo! a large structured catalog of categories (categories) has been compiled. First, the search is carried out in them, then in its own archive, then - using the Google system. Searching in categories gives good results - they are few and far between and good.

5. Lycos (www.lycos.com) Recently - one of the most popular systems. With all this, it does not provide any special features - "AND" "OR", search for phrases, mandatory presence / absence of a word; in advanced features - search in the title, URL, host name and / or domain name; 25 languages, including Russian - in a word, the entire "generally accepted" set. You can specify the content type of the resource - auto, books, ftp, download, news, etc. Obviously, the popularity of Lycos is a consequence of the scale of the ϶ᴛᴏth major project.

6. Rambler (www.rambler.ru) Until recently, the most famous Russian search engine. The advanced search doesn't allow you to search for phrases, and the regular search until February 1999 rarely produced acceptable results. Since February, the ϶ᴛᴏ system has been using an improved search engine, the design has changed, but the quality of Rambler is still not equal to Yandex and Aport (according to the author who analyzes search engines) The site has a rating catalog of Rambler Top 100 resources, one of the recognized sources of statistical information about Internet projects.

7. Aport (www.aport.ru) Another good Russian search engine. The search is carried out by text (only in all word forms) and by URL, using logical operators and the "…" operator (however, stop words in the phrase are still ignored), by date and in separate fields (title, description, etc.). ), the meta characters * and ! are supported. The presentation of search results is the most well designed compared to other Russian search engines. Some doubts are caused by the design of the main page, which is clearly overloaded with information. There is a slightly "lighter" version at http://aport.ru.

How to choose a search engine

When searching the Internet, two components are important - completeness (nothing was lost) and accuracy (nothing extra was found).

1. Coverage and depth

Coverage refers to the volume of the search engine database, which is measured by three indicators - the total amount of indexed information, the number of unique servers and the number of unique documents. Depth is understood as whether there is a limit on the number of pages or on the depth of directory nesting on one server.

How to check: Some machines write robot statistics on this site. But you can check it yourself - you need to set several search queries consisting of one word (ɥᴛᴏ to exclude the influence of the query language, including different interpretations of the space), and when ϶ᴛᴏm look at the statistics of the results issued by the machine - usually at the top of the list indicates how many documents were found in total. In addition to the fact that the words should be from different areas, it is also good to take words of different weights - rare, "medium" and "heavy" (frequent), and compare the number of found. Heavy words, in particular, test the full text (indexing of all the words in a document) of a search engine.

It is more difficult to check the depth of the robot’s walking - for ϶ᴛᴏ it is necessary to take some sites, for example, with a branched archive structure, and check whether the documents are indexed, which can be reached only, for example, in 6 clicks on the links.

2. Crawl rate and relevance of links

Web traversal speed shows how quickly a newly added resource is indexed and how quickly the information in the database is updated. Do not forget that an important indicator of the quality of a search engine (its robot) will be not only the capture of new territories, but also monitoring the status of those already covered. Servers disappear and stay, the pages on them are updated. Links, which are given by the search engine in the list of found, must, firstly, exist, and, secondly, their content must match the request.

How to check: Objective information can be obtained by analyzing the server logs - the search engine robot is usually represented by the name of its machine (or similar), so you can see how often it visits the server, how many pages it views, etc. Unfortunately, usually the log of only ϲʙᴏ of his site is available for study, so the experimental method remains.

To determine the crawl rate, you need to create a page of text somewhere, add it to search engines and see how quickly it starts to appear. Or change an existing page. It is worth saying that to determine the relevance of links, check the documents at least on the first page of the list found for several queries. The Not Found message indicates that the document no longer exists.

3. Search quality (subjective indicator)

It is worth saying that each search engine has a ϲʙᴏ and an algorithm for sorting search results. The closer to the top of the list is the document you need, the better the relevancy works.

How to check: Only by experiment. It is recommended to make requests of different lengths for comparison. You can also use the query language, while ϶ᴛᴏm those who are reluctant to read the description can use the expanded query page (“advanced search” in Aport and Yandex, “detailed query” in Rambler - translation options into Russian “advanced search”)

In addition to relevance, there are important user characteristics.

4. Search speed

If the search engine responds slowly, it is inefficient to work with it. It is worth adding that the speed seen by the user depends not only on the search engine itself, but also on Internet channels.

How to check: By experiment - you need to look for requests of different lengths, different<тяжести>words and at different times of the day (server load is significantly uneven throughout the day, the peak is about three to four in the afternoon)

5. Search capabilities (working with the document language, query language)

Another point of comparison is what exactly and how the search engine contributes to the index. It is worth saying that a full-text search engine indexes all the words of the text visible to the user. The presence of morphology makes it possible to find the desired words in all declensions or conjugations. In addition to ϶ᴛᴏgo, there are tags in HTML that can also be processed by a search engine (titles, links, captions for pictures, etc.)

Almost all machines have a query language in the form of standard logical operators (AND, OR, NOT). Some are able to search for phrases or words at a given distance - ϶ᴛᴏ is often important to get a reasonable result. An additional feature will be search in document zones - headings, links, keywords (META KEYWORDS), etc. An additional feature of the query language is a natural language query, which does not require knowledge of operators.

How to check: Usually this information is published on the server of the search engine (in Help "e). Note that, nevertheless, it is recommended to check on real queries, since sometimes what you want is given as valid.

6. Additional amenities

These are additional features that the search engine provides users with. This includes all sorts of search options (specialized pages, searching for similar documents, limiting the search area), and a list of found servers, and searching by dates and servers, and a convenient search engine interface, and the possibility of personalizing it.

How to check: The information may be partially published on the server of the search engine, but it is best to try to work with these features yourself.

It is clear that this analysis will take some time. Other than that, search engines, like the rest of the Internet, do not stand still. At the same time, given that the search for information is one of the important components of computer technology, it should be given sufficient attention - at least no less than the ability to work on a local network.

A survey was conducted on Yandex.ru: why the Internet is needed and what it lacks (http://www.yandex.ru/polling/9.html) In descending order, the survey data were distributed as follows: The Internet is used as a directory (23, 76%), research tool (15.45%), entertainment (14.15%), and only in fourth place - a news source (12.32%) It sounded optimistic that 10% of users always, and 73% often succeed find the information you need. And what is missing on the Internet: information, good search and order (including: orderliness, structure, structure, structuredness, structuring, as well as systems, systematization, systematization, systematicity and systematization)

ANSWER THE QUESTIONS:

What are the methods of organizing searches on the Internet?

How is information searched in catalogs and databases?

How is information entered into catalogs and databases?

What is Internet search engines?

How is an information database formed in search engines?

Where does the search for information in search engines begin?

What is a request?

How is information searched in search engines?

What is meant by query relevance?

What can be done in case of a very large number of documents found during further search?

What are metasearch engines?

What is the fundamental difference between metasearch engines and conventional search engines?

Which of the following systems will be metasearch engines:

What are the most popular domestic search engines?

What are the most popular foreign search engines?

What two components are important when searching for information on the Internet?

What characteristics determine the effectiveness of search engines when searching for information on the Internet?

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Intellectual rights to the material - Information computer networks - Borisov N.A., Lukin A.A. belong to its author. This manual / book is posted for informational purposes only, without involvement in commercial circulation. All information (including "Theme 3. Search for information on the INTERNET") is collected from open sources, or added by users free of charge.
For the full use of the posted information, the Site Project Administration strongly recommends purchasing a book / manual Information Computer Networks - Borisov N.A., Lukin A.A. in any online store.

Tag-block: Information computer networks - Borisov N.A., Lukin A.A., 2015. Topic 3. Search for information on the INTERNET.

(C) Legal repository site 2011-2016

Searching for information on the Internet

Searching for information on the Internet

To search for information in commonly used three ways(See Fig.1). First of them - search by address. It is used when the user knows the address of an information resource containing the information he needs. When organizing the search for information by address (the form of the address - IP, domain or URL - in this case does not matter), the user simply needs to enter the address of the resource in the appropriate field of the browser - a program designed to provide access to network resources.

Rice. 1. Ways to search for information in hypertext databases

Second- search using hyperlink navigation. When using this type of search, the user must first access the server associated with the corresponding database. You can then find the document using hyperlinks. Obviously, this method is convenient when the address of the resource is unknown to the user. To be used as a starting point for searching when implementing this method, Web portals are intended - servers that provide direct access to a certain set of servers, including information resources installed on them, as well as Web applications that implement Web services corresponding to the purpose of the portal. Servers accessible through the portal may refer to a specific system (for example, corporate) or different systems and be specially selected according to the specific, thematic or other features of the documents and data contained on their sites. Typically, portals combine a variety of functions in order to keep the client as long as possible. The dominant service of the portal is the reference service: search, rubricators, financial indices, weather information, etc. While Web sites are mostly collections of static Web pages, portals are collections of software tools and pre-unstructured information that these tools turn into structured data at the request of specific users.

Third the search method involves the use of Internet search servers. Search servers are dedicated hosts - computers that host databases of Internet resources. The user interface of such a server has a field for entering keywords that describe the topic of interest to the user (See Fig. 2).

Fig.2. View of the Yandex search server window

The server perceives these words as an information request, in accordance with which it searches for resources and presents a list of found documents to the user. Obviously, when implementing this method, errors of both the 1st (missing the target) and the 2nd kind (information noise) are possible. It should be mentioned that two groups of search servers are distinguished: search engines and subject directories. Their difference is due to the method of creation and subsequent replenishment of the database of Internet resources, which this server performs information retrieval. So, search engines have in their composition a special program - a search robot. It constantly monitors the network, collects information from Web pages, indexes them and fixes their search image in its database. In subject catalogs, a database of Internet documents is formed "manually" by specialist editors. Since there is no single administration on the Internet, its information resources are constantly changing. New documents can appear in it and existing documents can disappear. The frequency of updating information in documents for different sites is different: for some it is several times per hour, for some it is once a day, day, month, etc. Therefore, it is very important to understand that when using information retrieval systems to find information on the Internet, the search is carried out not in the real space of the Web documents, but in some model, the content of which may differ significantly from the actual content of the Internet at the time of the search. According to the degree of coverage of indexed resources, search engines can be divided into two groups: international and Russian-speaking. The former index all documents published on the Internet in a row. The second indexes resources located in domain zones with a predominance of the Russian language. The list of the most popular systems is given in Table. 1.

Tab. 1. Most Popular Search Engines

International	Russian speakers
Google	Yandex (44.4% of Runet)
Yahoo!	Rambler (10.6% of Runet)
bing	Mail.ru (7.3% of Runet)
msn	Nigma (0.5% Runet)
AltaVista	Gogo.ru (0.3% Runet)
Ask	Aport (0.2% Runet)

Note: Runet is the Russian-speaking part of the Internet, which makes up domains with names ru and rf.

It should be mentioned that there is a special category of search engines - metasearch engines. Their fundamental difference from search engines and subject catalogs is that they do not have their own index database, and therefore, upon receiving a user request, they redirect it to several search servers at once (See Fig. 3).

Rice. 3. The scheme of the metasearch system

The ability to simultaneously use multiple search engines for a single request is an obvious advantage of metasearch engines. At present, the Metabot.ru system has found wide application, the interface of which is shown in Fig. 4. This system allows you to use both international and Russian-language search servers to search for resources.

Three Ways to Search the Internet

The Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, provide the subscriber with access to thousands of servers and millions of Web pages that store an unimaginable amount of information. How not to get lost in this "information ocean"? To do this, you need to learn how to search and find the necessary information on the network.

As already mentioned, there are three main ways to find information on the Internet.

1. Specifying the page address. This is the fastest search method, but it can only be used if the address of the document is known exactly.

2. Navigation through hyperlinks. This is the least convenient method, since it can be used to search for documents that are only similar in meaning to the current document. If the current document is dedicated to, for example, music, then using the hyperlinks of this document, it will hardly be possible to get to a site dedicated to sports.

3. Contacting a search server (search engine). Using search engines is the most convenient way to find information. Currently, the following search servers are popular in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet: Yandex; Rambler.

There are other search engines as well. For example, an efficient search system is implemented on the mail.ru mail service server.

Search servers

The most accessible and convenient way to find information on the World Wide Web is to use search engines. At the same time, information can be searched for by catalogs, as well as by a set of keywords characterizing the searched text document.

Consider the use of search servers in more detail. search server contains a large number of links to a wide variety of documents, and all these links are systematized in thematic directories. For example: sports, movies, cars, games, science, etc. Moreover, these links are set by the server independently, automatically by regularly viewing all Web pages that appear on the World Wide Web. In addition, search servers provide the user with the ability to search for information by keywords. After entering keywords, the search server starts browsing documents on other Web servers and displays links to those documents in which the specified words are found. Typically, search results are sorted in descending order by a special document rating that indicates how well a given document matches the search criteria or how often it is requested on the web.

Search engine query language

A group of keywords, formed according to certain rules - using the query language, is called a request to the search server. Query languages ​​for different search engines are very similar. You can learn more about this by visiting the "Help" section of the desired search server. Consider the rules for generating queries on the example of the Yandex search engine.

Operator syntax	What does operator mean	Request example
space or &	Logical AND (within sentence)	Fixed dentures
&&	Logical AND (within the document)	Types && (Fixed Dentures)
|	Logical OR	photo | photography | snapshot | photographic image
+	Mandatory presence of the word in the found document	+to be or +not to be
()	Grouping words	(technology | production) (cheese | cottage cheese)
~	Binary operator AND NOT (within a sentence)	banks ~ law
~~ or _	Binary AND NOT operator (within document)	Paris travel guide ~~ (agency | tour)
/(nm)	Distance in words (minus (-) - back, plus (+) - forward)	suppliers /2 coffee music /(-2 4) education vacancies ~ /+1 students
« «	Phrase search	"Fixed dentures" Equivalent to: Fixed /+1 dentures
&&/(nm)	Distance in sentences (minus (-) - back, plus (+) - forward)	medicine && /1 dentures

General information.

Currently, the Internet unites hundreds of millions of servers that host billions of different sites and individual files containing various kinds of information. It's a giant repository of information. There are various methods of searching for information on the Internet.

Search by known address. The required addresses are taken from directories. Knowing the address, it is enough to enter it into the address bar of the Browser.

www.gov.ru - server of Russian state authorities.

Address construction by the user. Knowing the Internet address generation system, you can construct addresses when searching for Web sites.

It is necessary to add a thematic or geographical domain to a keyword (the name of a company, enterprise, organization or a simple English noun), and intuition must be connected.

Commercial Web site addresses:

www.cnn.com (CNN World News),

www.sony.com (from SONY),

www.mtv.com (MTV music news).

Addresses of educational institutions:

www.ntu.edu (US National University).

Regional server addresses:

www.poland.net (Poland),

www.israil.net (Israel).

Internet search engines

To search for information on the Internet, special information retrieval systems have been developed. Search engines have a regular address and are displayed as a Web page containing special tools for organizing search (search string, subject catalog, links). To call a search engine, just enter its address in the address bar of the Browser.

According to the method of organizing information, information retrieval systems are divided into two types: classification (rubricators) and dictionary.

Rubricators (classifiers) are search engines that use a hierarchical (tree-like) organization of information. When searching for information, the user looks through thematic headings, gradually narrowing the search field (for example, if you need to find the meaning of a word, then first you need to find a dictionary in the classifier, and then find the right word in it).

Dictionary search systems are powerful automatic software and hardware systems. With their help, information on the Internet is viewed (scanned). Data on the location of this or that information is entered into special reference books-indexes. In response to the request, a search is performed in accordance with the query string. As a result, the user is offered those addresses (URLs) where the searched word or group of words was found at the time of scanning. By selecting any of the proposed links, you can go to the found document. Most modern search engines are mixed.

The most famous and popular search engines:

www.aport.ru www.yahoo.com www.rambler.ru www.yandex.ru www.altavista.com www.google.com

There are systems that specialize in searching for information resources in various areas.

Search for people on the Internet:

www.whowhere.ru www. bigfoot.com

Search by newsgroups (Usenet):

www.dejanews.com

Subject search engines:

Software search:

Search in file archives:

http://ftpseach.com city.ru, http://ftpsearch. licos.com

Catalogs (thematic collections of links with annotations):

http://www.atrus.ru

Often, an effective search for information can be carried out using regional catalogs - specialized servers containing data about enterprises or Web resources of a city or region. For example, for St. Petersburg, such a catalog is located at http://www.spb.ru.

A list of IPS can be found at www.monk. newmail.ru

A more detailed list of search engines and directories is presented in Table. 3.2.

Query Execution Rules

In each search engine, in the Help section, you can get information on how to search, how to compose a query string. Below is information about a typical, "average" query language.

Simple request.

Enter one word that defines the search topic. For example, in the Rambler.ru search engine, it is enough to enter: automation.

Documents are found that contain the words specified in the request. All forms of Russian words are recognized, as a rule, the case of letters is ignored.

You can use the character "*" or "?" in the query. Sign "?" in the keyword, one character is replaced, in place of which any letter can be substituted, and the character "*" is a sequence of characters.

For example, a query automaton* will find documents that include the words automatic, automatic, and so on.

Complex request.

Often there is a need to combine keywords to get more specific information. In this case, additional linking words, functions, operators, symbols, combinations of operators separated by brackets are used.

For example, the query music & (beatles | beatles) means that the user is looking for documents containing the words music and beatles or music and beatles.

Table 3.1 shows the rules for generating requests adopted in the Aport system (http://www.aport.ru).

Table 3.1

Operators for Forming Requests

Operator	Synonyms	A comment
AND	AND &	The query will find documents containing both keywords. It may or may not be written. For example, the query: computer science and textbook is equivalent to computer science textbook
OR	OR |	Searches for those documents that use either of the specified words or both words at the same time
NOT	NOT-~	The search is limited to documents that do not contain the word specified after the operator
" "	" "	Double or single quotes allow you to find a phrase
date=	date:date=	The search is limited to documents that fall within the specified date interval. Example 1. currency date=01/02/2002-01/03/2002. This request will return documents containing the word "currency" and having a date between February 1, 2002 and March 1, 2002. Example 2. date=01/03/2002 currency Example 3. date:<02/03/2002 валюта

Table 3.2

List of search servers and directories

Address	Description
www.excite.com	Search engine with node reviews and guides
www.alta-vista.com	Search server, advanced search capabilities available
www.hotbot.com	search server
www.poland.net www.israil.net	Regional search servers of Poland, Israel
www.ifoseek.com	Search Server (easy to use)
www.ipl.org	Internet Publik library, a public library operating as part of the World Village project
www.wisewire.com	WiseWire - organization of search using artificial intelligence
www.webcrawler.com	WebCrawler - search server, easy to use
www.yahoo.com	Web catalog and interface for accessing full-text search on the AltaVista server
www.aport.ru	Aport - Russian language search server
www.yandex.ru	Yandex - Russian-language search server
www.rambler.ru	Rambler - Russian-language search server
Internet Help Resources
www.yellow.com	Internet Yellow Pages
monk. newmail.ru	Search engines of various profiles
www.top200.ru	Top 200 Websites
www.allru.net
www.ru	Catalog of Russian Internet resources
www.allru.net/z09. htm	Educational Resources
www.students.ru	Russian student server
www.cdo.ru/index_new. asp	Distance Learning Center
www.open. ac. UK	Open University UK
www.ntu.edu	US National University
www.translate.ru	Electronic text translator
www.pomorsu.ru/guide. library.html	List of links to net libraries
www.elibrary.ru	Scientific electronic library
www.citforum.ru	Digital library
www.infamed.com/psy	Psychological tests
www.pokoleniye.ru	Internet Education Federation website
www.method. people.ru	Educational Resources
www.spb. www.osi.ru/ic/distant	Distance learning on the Internet
www.examen.ru	Exams and tests
www.kbsu.ru/~book/	Computer science textbook
Mega. km.ru	Encyclopedias and dictionaries

Searching for information on the Internet: pitfalls

Problems that do not lie on the surface often make themselves felt only "in retrospect", after a certain stage of prospecting work has been completed and, perhaps, based on its results, some decision has already been made. What prevents making the situation transparent from the very beginning of the operation of this or that information retrieval system (IPS)? The answer is quite simple: the lack of comprehensive information of this kind on the part of the developer. The direct consequence of this is the unreliability of the received data and their uncontrolled loss. It is rare to find a search engine on the Web that does not have some "undocumented" features. It would seem that the user does not need so much information, namely:

how the IPS database is filled and what is its volume;

full range of possibilities of the search language of the system;

the main features of the presentation of search results, primarily the algorithm for ranking records from the list of responses to a search query.

Alas, the source of such information is usually not a document available from the main page of the search server, but publications of individual authors scattered over the Web, books and computer magazines. The reasons for this state of affairs, apparently, include not only the negligence of the developer, but also a factor called marketing policy. Simply put, providing the search engine with the most complete information about itself does not always have a positive effect on its ranking. Nevertheless, in some cases, the user is quite capable of taking the situation under control. It is often possible to find out the features of the selected search service with the help of testing. Building special test queries that quickly clarify exactly that aspect of the system's operation that is most important for the current task turns out to be non-trivial in many cases. How to avoid some of the troubles when working with IPS, we will devote our discussion. As examples illustrating the presentation, widely known Internet search engines will be considered.

Effective search for information using a computer is an urgent task that arises not only for beginners, but also for experienced Internet users, because whoever owns the data owns the world, as the well-known saying goes. Today we will analyze ways to quickly find the necessary and important information on the Russian-speaking Internet. At the moment, there are only three types:

1. by indicating the direct address of the site where the necessary data and necessary information are located;
2. surfing the links using a personal computer on the Internet;
3. using search engines (machines) on the Internet.

Let us consider in more detail all the ways to search for up-to-date information on the network using a computer.

Searching for information via a direct link on the web

If you already know at what address on the Internet the information you need is located, then searching using a computer is noticeably easier: just enter the site address into the browser line and familiarize yourself with the proposed data. If you have opened a large text on a website page on the Internet, and you are interested in just a few lines hidden in a “ton” of printed characters, then you can use the in-page search. To do this, press the key combination Ctrl and F (of any computer keyboard layout), and in the proposed “Find” column, type in the phrase or word that is exactly contained in the paragraph with the information you are looking for, and then press “Enter”.

The browser will highlight in a different color all the words mentioned on the page that are similar to the word you are looking for. However, it often happens that we do not remember or do not know the links with the location of information on the Internet. In this case, it is most convenient to resort to the other two types of data search using a computer.

Search using internet surfing

Internet surfing is a search in which a sequential transition is made through links from one thematic site to another until the source of the necessary data is found. The advantage of this method of Internet search for data lies in its fascination and the ability to master a large amount of information from different sites consistently and thoroughly. Among the disadvantages of this type of search is its duration, as well as the fact that you also need to somehow get to the original site from which you start surfing. And if you do not have the address of the site from which you will start surfing, then here you will have to resort to the help of such a search method as search engines.

Ways to find information on the web using search engines

Today, such search engines as Yandex.ru, Rambler.ru, Google.ru are widely known to the Runet public. These sites allow you to search for data on the input query on all Internet sites. According to the principle of operation, search engines are of two types: search indexes and search directories:

• search directories. These sites provide assistance in searching for data on a specific topic on the Internet: the information in such catalogs is clearly structured into groups and topics, which helps to quickly find the result. In each topic, the user is offered a number of links to sites where you can find the knowledge of interest to him.
• Search indexes. These are pointer sites in which, when entering a keyword in the search bar, the user receives a series of links to pages on the Internet that contain the requested word or phrase. Search indexes perform searches using special programs called "spiders" that scan the pages of sites on the Internet for their topics. After such a scan, the search engine enters them into its database, from which information is later “gotten” when the user enters a request in the search period.

Rules for searching for information on the Internet

Now let's consider the basic, but important rules for effectively searching for up-to-date information on the Russian-language Internet using a computer.

1. Form the correct key phrase to address the search engine. You can't use only one search word if you want to get really useful results, and you shouldn't enter too large phrases either. The optimal search query size is 2 to 4 words. If the search engine found too few results in the search results, then you should try to reformulate the entered phrase, replacing some words with synonyms, and also check for spelling errors in the words. Remember: there is no such information that is not on the Internet. Just choose the right words, follow the rules and you will find what you are looking for.
2. Use special operators. A modern, efficient and fast search for any necessary information through a search engine and using a personal computer implies the knowledge and application of some tricks, which are abbreviations and special operator characters. Operators are icons used when forming a query in a search engine and making it easier to find the necessary data. Consider the most common operators and their meanings, which may be useful in practice.
3. A space or sign & - means that you want to search for documents with the required phrase within one sentence. An example of entering into the search bar: delicious recipe or tasty & recipe.
4. && - means the need to search for a page on which individual words from the phrase will be mentioned within the entire text, and not just one sentence. Example: delicious && recipe.
5. | - you will be offered articles within which only 1 of the entered words will be used. Example: marriage | disadvantage | defect.
6. + - means searching for text with a mandatory combination of consecutive words entered between the "+" sign. Example: delicious + recipe.
7. “ ” – search for a chain of words without breaking it into separate words. Example: “Krasnaya Polyana sweets”.

By following these simple rules when searching for data using a computer and the Internet, you will make it easier for yourself and you can always quickly find the information you need at any time.