There are a number of search engines on the Internet. These search engines can locate almost anything you might like to find, but they can often be frustrating if you don't know how to use them to full advantage. My personal preference is Alta Vista because I've had more success with it than others I have used, and I just like the way it looks and how it works. Your favorite might be one of the other engines. Your choice of search engines doesn't matter nearly as much as the way you use it.

Most search engines have an advanced search feature which can help narrow down a search and limit the number of hits you get to a reasonable number. I have found that one technique will do more for your search capability than all the advanced features of these search engines - the use of quotes! For example, if I search for Paul L. Schmehl on Excite, I get 954,084 hits! The first hit is The Gettysburg Frame Shop so they get a shameless plug. :-) Unfortunately, the name Schmehl does not appear anywhere on their page. (So maybe I should take the shameless plug back?)

This is the problem with most search engines - too much information! If you're like me, you've spent hours and hours going through the first 60 or 70 hits, searching web page after web page, looking for the information that you were searching for to begin with. Often you can get parts of it, or find a page or two that fits what you're looking for, but you always end up thinking you might have missed something, not to mention having waded through numerous sites that are completely unrelated to your search. By changing the search I just did to "Paul L. Schmehl", Excite returns just 19 hits! And each and every one of them not only has my name on it, but has a direct quote from something I've said on the Internet or lists one of my web pages!

Now let's say you wanted to learn more about the US Constitution. You could search on HotBot for it, and you would get 45,220 hits. Or you could place it in quotes, "US Constitution", and get 3,830 hits. Perhaps you really wanted to find out more about the Fourth Amendment? By searching for "Fourth Amendment", you would get 3,330 hits. But let's say, what you really wanted to know about was search and seizure. By enclosing that phrase in quotes, you would get exactly 49,900 hits, and the first one is about Seizure Alert Dogs and the second hit is about seizures in dogs and cats! But that's not really what you're looking for, is it? So you search for "unreasonable search and seizure", and lo and behold, you get 1,020 hits, and the very first hit is a paper on that clause, and it includes cites to various cases which have affected your rights with regard to unreasonable search and seizure. But let's say what you really wanted to learn about was court rulings on abuse of the Fourth Amendment search and seizure clause. By searching for "unreasonable search and seizure" + "court rulings" + "abuse", the search returns just 18 hits! In other words, using strings of words enclosed in quotes and connected by the "plus" sign, makes your search much more specific and accurate!

Where this becomes critical, is when you are looking for something obscure or really unusual. I was asked by an individual to provide information about Richard Tavener, because I had once posted about him in a newsgroup. Richard Tave(r)ner was an Englishman who lived in the 16th century. His claim to fame is that he wrote a revised version of the Matthews Bible. (This is not exactly an ordinary, run-of-the-mill search!) The first thing I did was rummage through my archives, but I couldn't find any more than the newsgroup post this individual had found, which was what lead him to me in the first place. So, I fired up trusty Alta Vista and began to search for "Richard Taverner". In about an hour I was able to find about 70 different web sites, each of which provided tantalizing details about Richard Taverner's life, his work on the Taverner's Bible, a couple of other books he had written, some possible descendants who came to America, and his alma mater, The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Cambridge, England, where he rates a mention on their history page.

There are a number of search engines available, and some have more than one search capability. I've already mentioned Alta Vista, Excite and HotBot. Some others that are equally as useful are Euroseek, Infoseek, Lycos, MSN, Webcrawler and Yahoo. But searching for information can also involve things other than historical, legal or informational matters. You can also search for information about people that are alive today, businesses you are interested in contacting or cities you want to know more about. For that, there are several search engines available, depending on what you are looking for.v

If you want to locate a florist in Juneau, Alaska or get information about the night life in Des Moines, Iowa, you can visit Infospace. If you're looking for an email address for a long lost friend, Infospace can help with that too, but so can Bigfoot and Internet Oracle. Internet Oracle also has links to a number of search engines which can do reverse lookups. In other words, if you know the email address, you can find the person's name, address and phone number. If you know the phone number, you can find the name, address and email address, and so forth.

You may want to find a map some day so you can figure out how to drive to someone's house. There are search engines for that as well. MapQuest is an excellent resource, and MSN now has ExpediaMaps which can provide similar information. Want to look up a word? Go to Dictionary.com of course. (There are a number of good dictionary sites on the Internet. The hypertext Webster's at UCSD is one of the best.) If a Thesaurus is what you really need, Thesaurus.com is the place to go. And of course, the place to search for archived newsgroup posts is Deja.com. One more you might like to know about is FTP Search which allows you to search for files on the Internet (much like Archie used to do.) If you know the name of a file, you can use FTP Search to locate it if it still exists somewhere on the Internet.

As you can see, there are a large variety of search sites on the Internet that you can use to locate information. Some of them specialize in certain types of information (like Deja.Com.) You will find your searches are much more satisfying if you use the search engine most closely designed to do the type of search you want to do, but the most effective technique, regardless of the type of search engine, is to enclose your search in quotes. This ensures you will get exactly the information you're searching for.