How to Find Things on the Internet

There are basically three different ways to find information in an orderly fashion:

1. Locally Within any Given Website - A decent website will allow you to use indexes and/or searchable databases to find what you are looking for. This is a great method when you want to limit your search to a specific region or topic.

2. An Organized and Reviewed Search Engine - Yahoo is the best example of a search engine that first requires a website to register, and then reviews the website before adding it to their database. This type of search engine is a good choice when you want to cover many websites, but don't want to have to wade through a bunch of garbage.

3. Spiders, Robots and Crawlers - Alta Vista is a fine example of a search engine that uses a robot. The robot goes out at night and crawls around on the world wide web... retrieving all information that it finds. If you want to try to search for "everything that is out there", this is your best choice. Unfortunately, you must sort through the good, the bad and the ugly to get what you are after.