SURFING THE WEB

Refining The Information Highway

By: Dick Travis

The Information Highway has been with us for almost a decade and it seems to be widening at every turn.

How can we find out what we want to know, without becoming a master search engine analyst? Below are some sure-fire ways to eliminate the overflow of information and zero in on your particular concern. And it will be fun and more productive.

I’ll give you four choices, but please don’t confuse these as the ONLY choices—just some personal starting points that I have found to be very useful. They are: GOOGLE, YAHOO, REFDESK and DRUDGEREPORT!

GOOGLE is now King of the search engines and it is awesome, fast and accurate for not only finding information, but also finding images and other groupings of information. It can even look up your personal information by simply typing in your phone number, address or even your neighborhood.

Try it? You will be amazed or maybe irked when your age, address or former lawsuit appears for the world to see.

YAHOO is still growing and has been profitable for the last five quarters, so they must be doing something right. What YAHOO has that the others don’t is a form of distributed organization for their information. If you like games for example, you can be directed to a myriad of game websites or even online activity that is interactive with “live” opponents and most is free except for certain “fantasy baseball or NBA basketball” games..

Their news features are excellent and allow one to regionalize their searches or set up your own parameters for almost every kind of information that you can think of.

YAHOO is great for finding “opposing” points of view, for example YAHOO lists the Sludge Report, Smudge Report and the Drudge Retort as parodies on the infamous DRUDGEREPORT.

REFDESK is the ultimate in reference material. You can use their dictionary or thesaurus, search areas for medical, sports or other functional searches. If REFDESK doesn’t take you to a site that will answer your question, you may have to pay a few dollars to ASK JEEVES.

REFDESK can be overwhelming, but at the same time it contains a wealth of information on common tasks—homework—writer’s tools—Old Farmer’s Almanac and hundreds of other categories that you may need. Their medical search engine itself is worth the time as well as reverse address and reverse telephone number lookups.

DRUDGEREPORT is a very popular, but somewhat controversial site accessed by over 6,000,000 people a day. Who is Drudge? He is a recent celebrity in the writer’s circle who became famous during the Clinton administration for his controversial columns. His website is ultra simple. No animated pictures to annoy you, except for one “siren” that goes off when he is really aroused about something.

His site has access (links) to almost every news organization in the world, even eleven of the London papers including the tabloids! Is his news accurate? Mostly yes, because he is merely linking what he believes to be the exciting or interesting bits of news items for the day, at the top of the page. However, looking further, he gives you the opportunity to see the AP news and actually type in a “word” or “phrase” that you may be interested in, along with the number of days back in time--then the AP site immediately returns with any articles on those subjects.

His linking of the world press is probably as complete as any others.…check out the Islamic Republic Wire, the BBC or even the Chinese outlet—XINHUA, for an independent view of the world’s news.

Surfing the World Wide Web can be more fun and productive when you know where to go to refine your thirst for knowledge. Surfing the Web is an interactive--not passive--experience that will keep you abreast of world opinion, facts and helpful details to solve your everyday tasks better.

Email me at dtravis2@cox.net or call at (760) 724-4091