Researching Online For Dummies^® , 2nd Edition

by Reva Basch; Mary Ellen Bates

• ISBN13: 9780764528576
• ISBN10: 0764528572
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2001-01-01
• Publisher: For Dummies

Summary

Whether you're beginning a college thesis or searching for a new toaster, Researching Online For Dummies, 2nd Edition, is your key to finding the information you need -- online and anytime. This book helps you develop a multitiered research strategy using keywords and index terms to dive deep into the sources found on the Web... * Explore the mental tools and online resources successful researchers rely on every day. * Take a look at the online world that goes beyond the Internet. * Familiarize yourself with search engines, indexes, quick reference aids, and other online professional services you can access from your computer. * See how Boolean searching and other power-search tips and techniques can greatly aid your research. * Apply these search techniques to real-life research situations. * Get acquainted with some of the best -- and best-hidden -- resources in important subject areas, such as news, business, technology, and government information. Researching Online For Dummies, 2nd Edition, also offers a 30-page directory dedicated to describing selected research sites, services, and other useful online resources. The book's bonus CD-ROM includes search engine help files from Northern Light and Lycos as well as demo versions of Copernic, BullsEye, and WebWhacker.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
What Librarians Know	p. 1
Searching versus Surfing	p. 2
What Makes a Good Researcher?	p. 2
What We Know About You	p. 3
How This Book Is Organized	p. 3
Conventions and Icons Used in This Book	p. 5
What's New in the Second Edition	p. 6
One More Thing	p. 7
Getting Started	p. 9
The Many Faces of Online	p. 11
The Online World: Library, Bookstore, or Shopping Mall after an Earthquake?	p. 11
The Net beneath the Web	p. 12
Gopher it!	p. 13
Telnetting around	p. 14
Gated, Not Open; Fee, Not Free	p. 14
Probing professional online services	p. 15
Members-only Web sites	p. 15
The Human Side of the Net	p. 16
Thinking and Working Like a Researcher	p. 17
Reference-Interviewing Yourself	p. 18
Where Do You Start?	p. 19
Mental-mapping your online resources	p. 20
Reality-checking	p. 24
When Bad Things Happen to Good Searchers	p. 25
Yikes, 42,178 hits! What do I do now?	p. 26
Waah! How come I didn't get anything?	p. 27
Why on earth did I get This?	p. 27
Evaluating what you get	p. 28
Boolean (And Other) Basics	p. 29
Boolean searching	p. 29
Proximity operators	p. 33
Field searching	p. 35
Pluralization, truncation, and wild cards	p. 36
Case-sensitivity	p. 38
Knowing When You're Done	p. 39
Using What You Find	p. 40
The Tools of the Trade	p. 41
The Search Engine Sweepstakes	p. 43
Timeless Tips for Effective Searching	p. 44
What to Consider When Choosing a Search Engine	p. 45
Exploring General Search Engines	p. 46
AltaVista	p. 46
Excite	p. 47
GO Network	p. 48
HotBot	p. 49
Northern Light	p. 50
Making Your Mark with Meta-Engines	p. 52
Inference Find	p. 53
SavvySearch	p. 53
The BigHub.com	p. 53
Ask Jeeves	p. 54
Invisible Web	p. 54
Dogpile	p. 54
The Offline Meta Alternatives	p. 55
Copernic	p. 55
BullsEye	p. 56
Sherlock	p. 56
Watching the Web with Search Engine Watch and Showdown	p. 56
Using Specialty Search Engines	p. 57
The All-in-One Search Page	p. 57
Search.com	p. 58
Beaucoup Search Engines	p. 58
Searching Newsgroups with RemarQ	p. 58
Pinpointing People	p. 60
Yahoo!-ing friends and family	p. 60
Plugging into Switchboard	p. 62
Some Tips for People-Finding	p. 62
The problem with e-mail listings	p. 62
They're not listed--now what?	p. 63
Locating Businesses	p. 63
Finding firms with BigBook	p. 64
Getting info from infoUSA	p. 65
Going global with WorldPages	p. 66
Questing for Maps with MapQuest	p. 67
Shopping for Software with Shareware.com and Download.com	p. 69
Finding freebies at Shareware.com	p. 69
Browsing at Download.com	p. 70
Subject Catalogs: The Narrow-Down Approach	p. 71
Narrowing Your Search: The Drill-Down Drill	p. 71
Subject Catalogs versus Search Engines	p. 72
Hybrid Subject Catalogs	p. 73
Getting a hole-in-one with Yahoo!	p. 73
AltaVista's views of the Web	p. 75
Excite-ing possibilities	p. 75
GO seek and ye shall find	p. 76
Pure Subject Catalogs	p. 77
World Wide Web Virtual Library	p. 77
Argus Clearinghouse	p. 78
About.com	p. 79
Playing the Links: Guru Pages and Mega-Sites	p. 81
Tapping Into the Contributions of Others	p. 82
Guru Pages: Experts, Enthusiasts, and Obsessives	p. 83
Mega-Sites: Stepping through the Gateway	p. 84
The librarian's guide to everything	p. 84
The joys of jurisprudence	p. 85
Ready Reference: Finding Facts Fast	p. 89
Reference: Research Light	p. 89
Virtual Reference Collections	p. 90
Internet Public Library	p. 91
The Virtual Reference Desk	p. 92
Research-It!	p. 92
The Yahoo! Reference Collection	p. 94
Becoming a Reference Ace	p. 94
Hitting (A Few of) the Books	p. 94
The World Factbook	p. 95
Encyclopedia Britannica	p. 95
Roget's Thesaurus	p. 96
Random Reference Goodies	p. 96
How Things Work	p. 97
New area code lookup	p. 97
This day in history	p. 97
Visiting Libraries Online	p. 99
Libraries: Alive and Thriving Online	p. 99
Finding Web-based Library Catalogs	p. 100
Using WebCATS	p. 101
Thinking locally	p. 102
Looking at the Library of Congress	p. 103
Telnetting to OPACs	p. 104
Hytelnetting around	p. 105
A short side trip to Malaysia	p. 105
So It's in the Online Catalog; How Do I Get It?	p. 106
The ins and outs of ILL	p. 107
Buying instead of borrowing	p. 107
Xerox is not a verb: Requesting article photocopies	p. 108
Document delivery services	p. 108
The Delights of Digital Libraries	p. 110
SunSITE: The digital library mother lode	p. 111
The American Memory Project	p. 112
Images from the History of Medicine	p. 113
Knock, Knock: Gated Information Services	p. 115
Getting Acquainted with Gated Sites	p. 116
Sampling Members-Only Web Sites	p. 117
The New York Times on the Web	p. 118
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition	p. 119
Ei Village	p. 120
Consumer Goods: America Online and CompuServe	p. 121
America Online	p. 122
CompuServe	p. 124
Calling in the Pros: Going Wide and Deep with Professional Online Services	p. 125
Some prose on the pros of the pros	p. 126
Dealing with database depth	p. 127
The Other Online: Dow Jones, Dialog, Lexis-Nexis, and More	p. 128
Beating the averages with Dow Jones Interactive	p. 129
Shopping at Dialog's supermarket	p. 132
Learning the ways of Lexis-Nexis	p. 141
Getting it wholesale	p. 143
Web Search Engines Turn Pro	p. 145
Looking up Northern Light	p. 145
Browsing the Electric Library	p. 146
Power up with Powerize	p. 146
How Do You Choose?	p. 146
One Final Point	p. 148
The Personal Touch	p. 149
The Human Side of the Net	p. 149
Where Do the Experts Hang Out Online?	p. 150
Newsgroups	p. 150
Browsing newsgroups with Liszt	p. 151
Finding newsgroups with RemarQ	p. 153
Reading newsgroup posts	p. 154
Taking the temperature of a newsgroup	p. 155
Before you post: The FAQs of life	p. 155
Aunt Netty-Quette's priceless pointers for painless posting	p. 156
Mailing Lists	p. 157
Locating lists with Liszt	p. 158
Tile.net and the List of Lists	p. 159
Netiquette revisited	p. 160
Dealing with info- and subscription-bots	p. 160
Virtual Villages and Conferencing Systems	p. 161
Exploring virtual communities on the Web	p. 162
Finding community online	p. 163
Taking It to E-Mail	p. 163
Caveats and Cautions (Dealing with Human Nature)	p. 164
From the horse's mouth?	p. 164
The (low) signal to noise ratio	p. 165
Flame wars	p. 165
Overload	p. 166
Putting It All Together	p. 167
Strange New Worlds: Government, Medical, and Sci-Tech Research	p. 169
We're from the Government, and We're Here to Help You	p. 170
Mastering the info-maze with FedWorld	p. 171
Life beyond FedWorld	p. 173
In Sickness and in Health	p. 177
Tapping the medical literature with Medline	p. 177
Exploring other medical information sources	p. 179
Seeking support for medical problems online	p. 181
Mere Technicalities	p. 181
Knowing where to start	p. 182
What about patents?	p. 185
Satisfying your scientific curiosity	p. 189
Strictly Business	p. 193
Understanding Business Research	p. 194
Getting a Company Backgrounder	p. 194
Strategizing a background search	p. 195
Company directories and packaged reports	p. 196
Tapping company and industry news sources	p. 200
Broadening your company background search	p. 201
Planning a Competitive Intelligence Operation	p. 202
Using a company's Web site	p. 203
Finding alternatives to the annual report	p. 205
Getting informed analysis	p. 205
Monitoring the news	p. 207
The indirect approach	p. 209
Doing Market Research	p. 210
Surveying sources for market research reports	p. 211
Getting more for your money with secondary sources	p. 213
Prospecting for Sales	p. 218
Looking for prospects with CompaniesOnline	p. 219
The Dun's-on-the-Web alternative	p. 219
Investigating Investments	p. 220
Ask EDGAR	p. 221
Taking stock	p. 221
Digging deeper	p. 223
Getting personal	p. 223
How Do You Manage?	p. 224
Read All About It: News Media and Publications Online	p. 227
Broadcast News	p. 228
Tuning in to the Big Four: ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN	p. 229
Viewing some other contendahs: Fox and C-SPAN	p. 230
Getting the story worldwide	p. 230
News AND weather and sports	p. 230
Newspapers Online	p. 231
Finding your local paper online	p. 232
Searching newspapers on the Web	p. 233
Going deeper into the archives, part 1	p. 234
I Saw It in the Dentist's Office: Magazines Online	p. 236
Locating magazines online	p. 237
Going deeper into the archives, part 2	p. 239
Staying Current	p. 241
The Dally Brief	p. 242
In-Box Direct	p. 242
NewsPage	p. 243
NewsHound	p. 243
Northern Light Search Alert	p. 243
My Yahoo!	p. 244
Other news channels	p. 244
The 'Zine Scene: New Sources for News and Information	p. 245
Life Choices	p. 247
Choosing a College	p. 247
Finding college and university directories	p. 248
Following professional pointers	p. 248
What's up, pre-doc?	p. 250
Feeling listless?	p. 251
Lessons learned	p. 251
Finding a Job	p. 252
Job boards	p. 253
Going to the source	p. 255
Buying a Car	p. 255
Browsing car and consumer magazines	p. 256
Getting serious	p. 257
Asking around	p. 258
Doing the deal	p. 258
Lessons learned, continued	p. 259
Planning a Vacation	p. 259
Cruising through newsgroups	p. 261
Shipping out	p. 262
We be jammin'	p. 262
Travel is broadening	p. 263
Lessons learned, continued some more	p. 263
Recreational Research: Hobbies and Interests	p. 265
What's Cooking?	p. 266
Lights, Camera ... Research	p. 267
Playing the Keyboard	p. 270
Yahooling it	p. 270
Shop 'til you bop	p. 271
Musical true confessions	p. 272
Indoor Birding	p. 273
Doing It Yourself	p. 274
The Researching Online For Dummies, 2nd Edition Internet Directory	p. 1
The Broader Picture	p. 275
Keeping Up with the Online Jones(es)	p. 277
Help Is in the Mail: Electronic Resources	p. 278
Netsurfer Digest	p. 278
Net-happenings	p. 279
NEW-LIST	p. 279
Seidman's Online Insider	p. 280
Edupage and NewsScan	p. 280
The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing	p. 281
Search Engine Report	p. 281
Remember Paper?--Print Resources	p. 282
System-specific newsletters	p. 282
Independent publications	p. 283
Human Resources	p. 284
The Big Issues: Copyright, Information Use, and Quality	p. 285
Getting Right with Copyright	p. 286
Fair use	p. 286
Confusion, copyright, and the Net	p. 287
Copyright and the professional online services	p. 288
Copyright and the Web	p. 288
Using Information Responsibly	p. 290
Hopping along the audit trail	p. 290
YOYOW: You own your own words	p. 291
Thinking about Linking	p. 291
Assessing Information Quality	p. 292
Judging quality and reliability on the Net	p. 293
Establishing expertise	p. 295
Thinking critically	p. 296
The Part of Tens	p. 299
Ten Clarifying Questions for Better Research Results	p. 301
What Am I Trying to Accomplish?	p. 302
What Is This Really Worth?	p. 302
What Else Should I Consider?	p. 303
Am I Likely to Find My Answers Online?	p. 304
Is Online the Best Place to Look?	p. 304
What's My Plan?	p. 305
Who's Likely to Know the Answer?	p. 305
What Have I Gathered So Far?	p. 306
What Have I Overlooked?	p. 306
How Do I Know the Information Is Good?	p. 307
Ten Simple Tune-Ups for Streamlined Searching	p. 309
Change Your Start Page	p. 309
Bookmark Your Favorite Web Pages	p. 311
Fight Link Rot	p. 313
Turn Images Off	p. 314
Have a Cookie	p. 315
Don't Just Sit There	p. 317
Pay Attention	p. 318
Resist Temptation	p. 319
Aggregation, Not Aggravation	p. 319
Share Your Toys	p. 320
Ten Trends to Keep an Eye On	p. 321
Smarter Search Engines	p. 321
Intelligent Info-Bots	p. 322
Online Everywhere	p. 322
Personal Programming	p. 322
Ultra-Personal Programming	p. 322
Virtual Environments	p. 323
Fatter Pipes	p. 323
Looking Forward to the Past	p. 323
Internet Backlash?	p. 324
A Hiccup in the Continuum	p. 324
About the CD	p. 325
System Requirements	p. 325
Using the CD with Microsoft Windows	p. 325
Using the CD with a Mac OS	p. 326
What You Get on the CD	p. 327
Research help	p. 327
Research tools	p. 328
Internet tools	p. 329
Utilities	p. 330
Knowing the Difference between Freeware and Shareware	p. 331
Using the Internet Directory Links	p. 332
If You've Got Problems (Of the CD Kind)	p. 333
Index	p. 335
IDG Books Worldwide End-User License Agreement	p. 353
Installation Instructions	p. 356
Book Registration Information
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

The Many Faces of Online

In This Chapter

* Unearthing the hidden online

* Investigating fee-based services

* Contacting the Net's human resources

Amazing as it may seem, the online world was alive and thriving long before the arrival of the World Wide Web. Yes, the Web has grabbed the spotlight as a glamorous, fun-loving, party animal -- every would-be information junkie's dream date. But for all its multimedia glitter and flash, the Web is a newcomer to the online world, and a derivative and ditzy one at that.

Harsh words? Not really. I adore the Web. The Web is fast becoming the preferred route for information publishing of all kinds. But the Web is not synonymous, quite yet, with online . The Web is an overlay on a much older, quieter and less chaotic environment -- the Internet itself. Early Net denizens developed an extensive array of electronic archives, or collections of specialized information, and the research tools needed to plumb them. You can now access many of these resources through the Web, but you may want to bypass the Web at times and go direct. See the section, "The Net beneath the Web," later in this chapter for the when, why, and how of accessing these electronic archives directly.

Coming up with creative ways to describe the online world could be a full-time job for a wordsmith. For all I know, a roomful of English majors are sitting around somewhere, busily minting metaphors on the subject. Make them stop, please, and tell the one who came up with the term "web-surfing" to stand in the corner, right next to the guy who invented "Information Superhighway." Thanks. I feel better now.

Actually, metaphors can be useful. They help you create a mental map of the territory you're getting into. Someone -- one of those English majors, probably -- once called the Web "the world's biggest library." If only it were all as orderly and logical as a real-world library. Some sections, like the Library of Congress site (lcweb.loc.gov/loc/libserv/), really are library-like. Other parts are far more chaotic.

Some people prefer a bookstore metaphor to describe the online world. A bookstore can be as orderly as a library, or can be a chaotic jumble of idiosyncratic offerings that reflect the proprietor's taste and opinions. Parts of the online world really are like bookstores. You find neatly organized rows of information at www.yahoo.com, and highly selective offerings in web rings and at guru pages and mega-sites (see more about these resources in Chapters 5 and 6).

You might even find the online equivalent of helpful bookstore clerks and fellow browsers. We take a quick glance in this chapter at the human side of online research -- the kinds of information you can get from real, live experts who hang out in various places on the Net. Chapter 10 goes into a lot more detail about how to use these people-resources effectively.

Just to complicate the question of what the online world is really like, dozens of well-organized online services have developed independently of the Internet and still haven't fully merged with it. You can find professional database services, such as Dialog, LEXIS-NEXIS, and Dow Jones Interactive. You can also find popular (or once-popular) online venues, such as America Online and CompuServe. Each of these services has something unique to offer information-wise, and its own way of organizing it and making it available. We do a brisk survey of them in this section, and go into more detail in Chapter 9.

My favorite metaphor for the online world is "a shopping mall after an earthquake." This implies a worst-case scenario. Go in expecting total chaos, and you're pleasantly surprised when you stumble across a section that hasn't been thoroughly trashed, and that still bears some semblance of order and rationality.

Much of the Web is a shopping center, earthquake-jumbled or not. You've got piped-in music and video entertainment along with retail opportunities galore. From a research standpoint, parts of the Web are totally content-free. No wonder you can't find the information you're looking for. When you get frustrated with your lack of results online, look around you: Are you even in the right neighborhood? You wouldn't expect to buy a Big Gulp in a bookstore, let alone a library; what makes you think you can find useful data in a cyber-mall? Get ye to another corner of the online world, posthaste. And don't forget your map.

The Net beneath the Web

Duck below the glossy surface of the Web and take a look at the raw, unvarnished Net, where it all began -- plain text on a blank background, no graphics, just information, in its pure, unadulterated form. The sight is kind of spooky, and beautiful, in its own austere way. If nothing else, it gives you an appreciation for how much the online research environment has evolved in just a few short years.

Gopher it!

One of the earliest ways of organizing information on the Net was through something called Gopher . A gopher is just a menu-based way of filing and finding information online. Gopher is a lot like the Web, but without the fancy multimedia effects. The grandmother of all gophers was developed at the University of Minnesota -- the name came from the state mammal and the University's mascot. Gopher is also a pun on "go-for," as in errand-runner. You figured that out, right? To see what a gopher of the non-furry variety looks like, type gopher://peg.cwis.uci.edu/into your Web browser.

Since most Web browsers no longer require you to type http:// at the beginning of a Web address or URL, we generally don't include them here. However, some other protocols, like Gopher or telnet, a prefix is required. When one's needed, we show it.

Figure 1-1 introduces you to PEG, a Peripatetic, Eclectic Gopher, serving your Internet research needs since 1992. Lovely, isn't it? Don't those folders look organized? And, if you're a Windows 95 user, don't they look awfully familiar ?

Now, click the folder labeled Accessing the Internet. Figure 1-2 looks like a list of destinations on the Net, and that's exactly what it is.

Notice the icons mixed in that look like pages rather than folders. Those icons represent files or documents -- destinations in themselves. Folders, like directories on your hard drive, contain other files and pointers to other destinations.

Just for fun, click Other Gopher and Information Servers and, on the next screen, All the Gopher Servers in the World. The next page may take a while to load, and for a good reason, too: The page is a list of 80 bazillion or so individual collections of information, ranging from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to ZAMNET, the Zambian National Gopher.

Searching in Gopherspace

Veronica is the gopher equivalent of a web search engine, such as Infoseek or AltaVista. If you glance back at Figure 1-2, you see a folder labeled Search all of Gopherspace (5000+ gophers) using Veronica. From here, you can do a keyword search and find gophers, anywhere in the world, that contain information on your topic.

Another type of search engine, called Jughead , is roughly equivalent to a Web page "search-this-site" feature. Jughead lets you search for information on the gopher site where you're currently parked, or sometimes in a collection of related sites. In case you're wondering, Veronica is allegedly an acronym for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives. Jughead supposedly stands for Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display.

You can also browse Gopherspace using specialized software programs, such as QVT/Gopher or WSGopher for Windows, or TurboGopher for the Mac.www.shareware.com will lead you to other free and low-cost gopher clients you can try out for yourself.

The bad news about gophers is that they're yesterday's technology, largely supplanted by the Web. The people who used to maintain them are now putting the same information up on public Web servers and corporate intranets. As a result, many gophers are stagnant relics containing reams of outdated and no-longer-useful information. In fact, of those 80 bazillion gopher entries on the worldwide list we just pulled up, an astounding number are no longer in service.

The other bad news is that Veronica and Jughead are real wimps compared to today's search engines. They're slow and awkward to use, and they only search the titles of documents, not the complete text. A title search is only as good as the title is descriptive, and often that's not good enough. For that reason, I'm not going to spend time here explaining how to use Veronica and Jughead. You can find help a click away online, often in a file called How to compose Veronica [or Jughead] queries, or something similar.

Why spend any time on gophers, then? The good news is that they're still a fast and convenient way to store and retrieve data, particularly lengthy texts and information that doesn't change very often. Many countries that don't yet have the communications bandwidth to support graphics and multimedia still maintain much of their information on gopher sites. If you know what you're looking for, and have at least a general idea of where to find it, then you can rejoice that gophers aren't extinct.

Where's Archie?

If you're old enough to remember the comic book characters Jughead and Veronica, you've probably been wondering: Is there an Archie, too? There certainly is. Archie is a tool for searching ARCHIvEs of software and other files that you can access through something called FTP , or File Transfer Protocol. You can find Archie on some gopher menus, such as the one at the University of Minnesota (gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu). When you download software or a large document from a Web site, you're sometimes FTPing without knowing it. Since the research we do in this book doesn't involve finding files with Archie or manipulating them with FTP, I won't spend time on them here.

Check the CD-ROM for software packages like Anarchie for the Mac or WS_FTP for Windows, to help you with Archie and FTP.

We have WAIS to make you talk

Another kind of retrieval mechanism called WAIS, for Wide Area Information Server, addresses some of the shortcomings of gopher searching. WAIS is the equivalent of a "deep" search engine, like AltaVista, HotBot, or InfoSeek, that purports to search not just titles, but every word in a document, and that displays the results based on how many times in each document your keyword appears. WAIS showed great promise in the early days, when searchers were desperate for something more powerful than Veronica and Jughead. It never caught on the way it should have. Nowadays, you're most likely to encounter WAIS without even knowing it, as a customized search engine embedded in a particular Web site or other online database. See Chapter 3 for more about these engines.

Hytelnet

No, Hy Telnet wasn't the slick-haired cohort of Archie, Veronica, and Jughead. That was Reggie, and I hate myself for remembering that. The word Hytelnet is actually a smooshed-together construction of hypertext and telnet . Hytelnet is a program that lets you look up library catalogs and other useful resources by geographic area or type of library, and then connect to them using the telnet protocol by means of a hypertext link.

The creator of Hytelnet, Peter Scott, has announced that he plans to stop development on the program and replace it with something new and even more useful. I hope so, because Hytelnet is a great shortcut to some incredibly useful information. For the moment, you can still use it through the Web at galaxy.einet.net/hytelnet/START.TXT.html. Figure 1-3 shows the Hytelnet Welcome page. See Chapter 8 to find out more about telnet and library catalogs.

Hot links, cool Lynx

When the Web first got started, it wasn't the multimedia circus it is now. Originally, it was designed to make it easier to move between related text documents through hyperlinks. You don't need Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer to read simple text; all you need is a browser that displays the documents and allows you to link from a document you're reading to another document that may be pertinent to it in some way. If you happen to find yourself on, or with access to, a UNIX-based computer system (if you are, you probably know it) you can experiment with a text-based browser called Lynx that comes already installed on many UNIX systems. Just type lynx followed by a space and the full URL ( Uniform Resource Locator , or Web address) of the site you want to visit, like this:

lynx http://www.yahoo.com

Figure 1-4 shows the text-only version of the Yahoo! Welcome screen. See Chapter 5 for more on Yahoo!.

The term text-only means that text is all you get -- no images, movies, audio clips, or other special, effects. Lynx uses the Up and Down arrow keys on your keyboard to move around the screen, and the Left and Right arrow keys to navigate back and forth (or forth and back) between links. You can find built-in help, the ability to print or save documents, and even a way to create and maintain a bookmark file -- just as you can with Netscape or Internet Explorer.

Lynx isn't very exciting to look at, but boy is it fast . Without all those huge graphics and multimedia files to clog up your download, pages viewed in Lynx appear almost instantly. What a relief from the World Wide Wait. I sometimes use Lynx when I'm after truth, not beauty -- when I know that the pictures at the site I'm visiting aren't necessarily going to be worth a thousand words.

The elephants' burial ground?

Are you starting to think that I've led you into a morgue, or some Internet backwater of dead and dying technologies? You may never use Gopher, Veronica, Hytelnet, or Lynx. But you may run into references to them as you move around the Net, and a knowing nod is much more impressive than a blank stare. Also, knowing this information is a "remember your ancestors" kind of deal; these are the foundations on which the Web was built.

Knowing about the forerunners of the World Wide Web is also a matter of perspective: Don't you feel more confident already, knowing that you'll be working with much more powerful tools than the Net-gurus of just a few short years ago had available to them; and that most of the useful information encapsulated in these now-underground sources is available to you, one way or another, through much easier means? I thought so.

Three of the most enduring misconceptions about online research are:

The information is all out there on the Net.

Everything on the Net is free.

All you have to do is type a couple of words into your favorite search engine, et voila -- instant, on-target edification.

You mean there's more to it than that? I'm afraid so, and here's why:

Some online resources are proprietary -- they're self-contained, and not part of the Net at large.

Some make you register first; access is by password only.

Some require you to pay a monthly or annual subscription fee, or charge you every time you use the service, and/or for each item you retrieve.

I call any online resource that matches one or more of these conditions a gated site or service, because the site is set off from the Web at large. Gated sites are closed , and the rest of the Web is open . Most Web spiders (spiders are special software programs used by search engines to crawl around and index the Web) can't climb the walls of a gated site, so whatever information is stored inside the gates is invisible from the outside. To get access to what's behind the walls, you have to be on the inside yourself.

Gated resources come in two flavors -- proprietary and Web-based.

Probing proprietary services

The Internet has been around for a long time. But so have dozens of other good-sized computer systems with names like Dialog, LEXIS-NEXIS , and Dow Jones . These are called proprietary online services. None of these services had anything to do with the Net until quite recently, and you can still reach them by dialing up and connecting directly to their computers, without going through the Internet at all. Before you can search them, you have to set up an account, agree to pay a pre-determined amount for the information you're going to receive, and supply a user ID and password every time you log in to look for information. Proprietary services use their own methods of organizing material into giant collections of information called databases . They require special protocols that are different from the query languages used by Web search engines to run searches and retrieve information.

Proprietary services sound like a pain to deal with, don't they? But they have a couple of distinct advantages:

They often contain information you won't find anywhere else online, such as legal cases, conference papers, dissertations, and obscure scholarly journals.

They're masters of aggregation . Proprietary services collect and make available, under one roof, sources that you would otherwise have to wander the great, wide Web to cover on your own. You can search hundreds, even thousands, of unique and valuable research resources at the same time.

Aggregation means that instead of visiting two dozen different newspaper sites to gather articles on the Rolling Stones' last tour, you can cover them all, plus hundreds more, with a single search query, if -- big IF -- you're willing to pay for it. These proprietary services don't come cheap. We talk about the costs, and about when and whether it makes sense to use them, in Chapter 9.

Gated sites on the Web

You find two different kinds of gated Web sites:

Some sites just require you to register. You may have to supply some information about yourself when you first sign up, but after that, you typically just type your name and a password, and you're in. Hundreds of Web sites require registration now, often because advertisers are interested in the data on age, gender, income, occupation, and spending habits that you're sometimes asked to provide.

Other sites make you register and pay a fee. This may be a subscription fee ranging from a couple of dollars to $50 or more a month, or a charge (often nominal) for every item you view, download, or print. Some subscriptions offer a certain amount of free usage; then you must pay for each additional item. Dozens of Web sites charge for access, from the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition (www.wsj.com/) to Engineering Information Village (www.ei.org/eihomepage/village/ intro.html) to the full-text special collection at the Northern Light search site (www.nlsearch.com/).

Whether free or not, gated sites all have one thing in common: A standard search engine won't touch them, and many Web indexes miss them, too. You may miss a lot if you ignore this sad fact, because gated sites are far too valuable to overlook. Chapter 9 has a lot more on gated sites, how to find them, and what they can do for you.

The Human Side of the Net

You probably think that the goal of your research project -- the answer to your question -- will come from something fixed and formal in nature, such as a product brochure, a company financial statement, a government report, a list of references or article summaries, a scholarly journal, or a story from a magazine or newspaper. It may even be a video clip, a sound file, or a piece of software. Every one of these things is a publication -- something that someone has produced and published for the world to see and react to. Web sites are publications consisting of documents and pages.

But information comes in the form of conversation , too. Conversation is fast, and often fleeting. The online world is full of conversation pits, informal gathering places where people chat, tell stories, and express their opinions. Some of these people actually know what they're talking about, and some of them may be willing to share their knowledge with you.

Tapping into human expertise online calls for a different set of research skills, involving psychology, and some anthropology and sociology, too. Every online hangout has its own culture and set of behavioral norms. You can find knowledgeable folks hanging out in newsgroups, in mailing lists or listservs, in chat rooms, electronic conferences, and other virtual communities. You can converse with them publicly, or go one-on-one in e-mail.

People made the Net what it is today. Sometimes, it makes sense to go directly to the source, Chapter 10 explains how to find, interact with, and get the information you need from other people online.

Copyright © 1998 IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.. All rights reserved.