by Richard Kool
IT SEEMS like the big thing today is to `surf the net.' Well, Rick's advice is don't bother unless you have lots of time to spend and nothing better to do. There are now probably tens of millions of web pages sitting on hundreds of thousands of servers, with zillions of words. While there's no reason you can't play around on the net, if you're a busy educator looking for something in particular, you've got to know how to find it.
Now remember, chaos lives under everything, and the net is no different. Those stalwarts who try to keep chaos at bay librarians, as you probably guessed find the world wide web difficult to deal with as there is no readily agreed upon cataloguing system; no Dewey decimal or Library of Congress here. In the days before the world wide web was really able to fulfill its designers' dreams, the main way of finding information on the net was through gophers. Originally designed at the University of Minnesota, gophers were an efficient way to store and retrieve information. The basic idea of the gopher, and of the web, is that every piece of information has a particular location that can be specified by an Internet address. This address, which we now call a uniform resource locator, or URL, allowed an information request from one computer to find its way through the net through what folks called global gopherspace to where it was intended to go, then retrieve what was there, and bring it home to mama.
The problem with gopherspace was that if you didn't know where something was, it was really hard to find. The first tool to overcome the difficulty was VERONICA (Very Efficient Rodent-Oriented Network Information Computer Assistant). VERONICA would search titles of files in global gopherspace for words of your choice, and bring back to you a list of files containing your words. From that point, a simple choice would get you the text files you were looking for.
But that is ancient history. The web now goes way beyond gopherspace, with a matrix of graphics, sounds, video, text (yes, that too) and now applets: small applications that can be passed around and run on the net. And the web is much much bigger than gopherspace! So what does one do? There are two strategies for searching the net: you can use an indexing service to find a general area where the materials you are looking for might be found, or you can do a search.
First, index services. From Netscape, you can go to the Network Directory http://home.netscape.com/escapes/internet_directory.html . Or you might take the direct route to the mother of all Internet indices, Yahoo!, at http://www.yahoo.com/. Here you have standard subject headings from which you can start to weasel your way down to the areas you are interested in. Of course, the creative part is figuring out the way that materials are categorized. As the San Jose Mercury News recently noted, Yahoo is closest in spirit to the work of Linnaeus, the 18th century botanist whose classification system organized the natural world.
To really get a feel for the web, try your luck at searching. Search engines like Open Text http://www.opentext.com/omw/f-omw.html, Excite http://www.excite.com/, Alta Vista http://www.altavista.digital.com/ or Lycos http://www.lycos.com/, all involve getting electronic robots crawling around the web collecting words, links, URLs, titles, etc. as they travel. Each search engine is different, and while each has its strengths, some might be more effective than others at getting at the materials you want.
For example, when I searched on "biodiversity," Alta Vista came up with 30,000 "hits", which likely relates to the number of times the word was found in its index. InfoSeek doesn't tell you how many hits it has made, but it does give you a sidebar menu of related terms (e.g. Bioecology, Biosciences, Zoology, Botany, Evolution) that you can search on. Open Text, on the other hand, reports that it found more than 3000 pages, web pages where the word might be used more than once. Open Text has a very neat interface offering the opportunity to search for multiple words, simple pull-down menus for choosing your favourite Boolean operator (and, or, not) and other pull-down menus for choosing what part of the web you want to search. It is worth getting to know how these engines work so that you can create really effective searches.
The most recent member of the web fauna is the MetaCrawler http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/index.html. This beast searches the search engines, sending your request for information out to at least nine of the major search services. It has some interesting features as well, such as the ability to search for one or more phrases, all words, or any one word. You can also specify in what country you want to search; if you're interested in biodiveristy in Finland, why mess around with the whole world! And if you're looking for a single source of search services, take a look at http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/resource/search-list.html.
So what are you waiting for? Start searching!